So, it’s been a while, but one of the main reasons for doing NaNoWriMo in the first place was to be able to pin down some things that will help me with writing in the future, just like any other writing project. In particular in this case, my writing habits. I think that the hard deadline and the close track I kept of things really helped a lot in figuring out what my habits were and can be in the long run, as well as the journaling along the way. I’d really recommend it for anybody who is trying to figure out how to be more productive, because I recognized some habits that I hadn’t fully realized I had before hand. So, these revelations fall into a number of categories, I bet you can guess what they are:
Good:
o Word count is better than page count. Dialogue, as most experienced writers know, will lie to you. It lets you fake out your pages with big white spaces of nothing. This is why people pay by the word rather than by the page in general. I knew this intellectually, but I hadn’t actually put it into practice before. Most of the time when I’d been setting writing goals, I’d been setting them by page count instead of by words. Words are actually much more consistent and get you through the book faster than pages. Stories are told in words, not in page counts. I think somebody else said that at some point and it just hadn’t sunken in yet.
o My original goal of 3,000 per day was pretty close to the money, but the more realistic tap out is at around 2,600. For 19 actual days of writing, the average ended up being 3,125 words a day, even. That extra 400 or so on a normal day is more of a bitch than one might think. When I got to the end of my daily word count, I was pushing it at 3,000 after I’d been sick. More of them really were closer to 2,300 but I think a little bit of stretch is good. That not withstanding, there were 5 days that I actually broke the 3,000 marker and 2 that I broke the 5,000 marker. So, a word count of 2,600 is probably what I’ll stick with.
o I cannot write slow. If I’m not plowing through something when I’m writing, I get bored. More to the point, really, I need to finish a project fairly quickly after thinking of it. I actually started planning Super Frosh in July. Or, at least, I started talking about it in July. I was really ready to buckle down and start writing with what I’d gotten done earlier than I did, I think, I just let myself put it off until November because I knew I wanted to do NaNoWriMo. In the long run, this was a good thing because it gave me a hard deadline that I had to push for. But, at the same time, I should’ve gone with one of the other ideas that was more fresh for me. By the time I got to the end of the month, I felt like I was saying the same thing over and over again in a large part because I’d been thinking about it for too long. And, it’s entirely possible I was. I still have to go back over it and read it again.
o I do better when I race. Or, at least, have someone that I’m up against in some way. I apparently am more motivated by competition than I am by rewards. I used to set up all kinds of rewards that I could have when I got done writing the pages that I was going to write. When you don’t have a lot of money to do rewards with, this gets tricky. I’ve heard of some great ones, but in the end, they just weren’t quite enough to get my butt in the chair. Competition, on the other hand, was. When Diana was a few thousand words ahead of me, you better believe my bum was in front of the computer and I got going. And when it was getting towards the end of the month and I had to push through to be able to make it with the other Nanus, I was there. So, challenge and competition are the way to go. Colleen’s said she’ll be my challenge buddy here over the next couple months, so now I’ve got that covered!
o I like my wall and sticky note outline system. I need to not do it in the living room. While some people thought it was a great conversation starter, my husband got tired of looking at it and picking the pages up off the floor in the hall as they fell down when the tape got un-sticky. So, I need to find a space in the office to put it up if I’m going to leave it. Though, once I’ve gotten the first round done, I think it should get turned into an outline rather than staying in its totally amorphous state. If I need to, I can always pull it out again and stick it up on the wall out of a notebook.
o I need to have really really developed characters. Not just a filled out form on a page. I think my next attempt for this is going to be writing up applications for them. In online gaming, and some other gaming though not as often, frequently you’re required to turn in a written background for your character along with any reasons that you have special circumstances that should be allowed above the normal beginning character guidelines. When I do this kind of thing for my gaming characters, I tend to know them backwards and forwards. This, of course, is much harder than stopping at filling out the forms. Typically my character applications are a good 12 pages in and of themselves. But, when I log on to play, I get to just go with the flow. When something happens, I know how my character would react. I’ve explained it for 12 pages already before I ever show up. And more than that, it generally has given me the voice of that character, because I try to write it up in some kind of creative way. I’ve done diary entries, epistolary email applications, tv interview shows with a bitchy reporter who is trying to make a name for herself using my character as a ladder. The next one I’m doing is in the form of an article the character’s writing in an academic style presentation to be turned in to some religious officials of her cultural group. The key with those is that I figure out how the character would say what I need to get across. Some of them aren’t going to say it to anybody out loud, so it’s a diary. Others are –only- going to say it out loud if they’re pressed, so an interview. It kind of gives me an angle on where they’re coming from in the beginning. Surprisingly, I’ve never done this for any of my book characters. Which is probably why they’re flat to me. So, my husband said I was silly and should try it. And, not unusually, I think he’s right.
o Sundays are really good days for me to write. Fridays and Saturdays not so much, as seen in a later explanation. But, the other days all came out about average. I missed one of each of the other days besides those two in the process of the month. But, in the end, I got where I needed to go, so I think it was all okay in the long run.
o Having the word counts up on the wall in front of me when I’m writing is also good. I had a monthly calendar on the wall where I wrote in how many words I’d written for the day, so on a tough one when I’d sit down and want to give myself a break, I could look up and see that I’d already had a couple earlier in the week, and needed to get over it and move on. Time was a wasting. So I’m going to keep doing that.
o I have a wonderful husband, especially when it comes to writing. I never once heard, ‘I haven’t seen you all month.’ Or, ‘Why do you have to go do that again tonight.’ In fact, in most of the advice I heard about either generic ‘book in a month’ or NaNoWriMo specifically, I always read things like, ‘Tell your husband you’re going to be ordering pizza when you need to.’ or ‘Get lots of casseroles for the month for him and the kids.’ I don’t have the kids thing to contend with thankfully, but on the husband side, I never had to worry about it. In fact, he cooked dinner every night, which he normally does, but it ended up that when I was done getting my writing done, there was either dinner coming off the stove or sitting in the microwave for me when I wanted it. And he didn’t mind when I came to bed at 1am and was grumpy in the morning. He’s used to the grumpy in the morning, but it would’ve been pretty easy to say something like, ‘Well, if you started writing earlier…’ or one of those non educated things that people who don’t write tend to say. In fact, he was very encouraging and always reminded me that we needed to get home from somewhere so I could get my writing done or told his mother that we couldn’t go do xy and z because I needed to work on my book. I’m really really lucky.
Bad:
o I wrote not a single word on any Friday or Saturday during the entire month of November. Not a one. This was after deciding that I was going to go ahead and plug on through and write Every Single Day. I actually think in the long run this doesn’t end up being too terrible a thing. What generally ended up happening is that we had people over at our house those days, even when we weren’t originally planning to. So, when I’m doing my writing schedule, I just need to remember that those days aren’t going to happen. Live with it, and move on. The up side there being, it isn’t as though my hands are removed on the weekends, so if I absolutely had to, I could lock myself in the study and ignore everyone else having a good time in the other room. I’m just not likely to do it, so there’s no point in counting on it.
o When I’m sick, I don’t write. The week that I got knocked out of work with the flu, I didn’t write for four of my seven days. Upside here, I don’t generally get sick very often. At least not really sick. And, I did write for those three even though I was out from work. Might not have gotten in stellar word counts, but I showed up at the keyboard. Bottom line, I need to plan in a little slack instead of running myself up to the wall. Which, in the end, I didn’t really do anyway.
o I cannot pants. I suck at writing without an outline. I must have something that gets me from the beginning to the end with steps in the middle. I might move them around, I might not stick with every little detail, but I have to be able to sit down and look at the mess and say, ‘This I have done, this I have not done, and this is what I need to do next.’ I don’t think I have to be as completely specific as I have in the past, but there were some benefits to it. I was much less stressed out and I got started faster. Which when you’re trying to knock out 10 pages a day of writing this is not insignificant.
The NaNoWriMo:
o Thanksgiving weekend is not a weekend to use to catch up on writing. NaNoWriMo is November, so there will always be a Thanksgiving in it. Nothing to be done about that. And so, the temptation will be there for me to say, ‘I have the weekend off, four whole days I can spend on writing!’ This is a lie. I have a mother, a mother-in-law, a husband, and a reluctant brother who will all always be either impressed into service for or planning on having a holiday. This year, we had it at my house, which means the Big Clean. The literal Motherload of all cleaning that results in scrubbing the baseboards and wiping down all the cabinets, wishing you had time to rent a steam cleaner and getting out the bleach for the grout between the tiles in the bathroom. This is, in particular, an issue during NaNoWriMo. The month in which my already abysmal cleaning habits have been thrown to the wind in the interests of getting things on paper. While I could have said that we should do it at someone else’s house, this really wouldn’t get me out of much because then I have to cook something and get myself there on time after everything else. So, either way, Thursday is out. Friday is generally out because the friends that I never get to see actually have the day off of work. So it’s not going to happen. The whole weekend isn’t a wash, I can generally get back to it by Sunday. I just need to wipe out those three days for page count. Which as we’ll see below, is really only losing one more day.
o Have everything ready before hand. Again, this was discussed a little more in general, but the times where I floundered in particular were troublesome because I didn’t know where I was going. The no-outline system and I are not a mix. So, October has to be prewriting month. And it has to be done by the beginning of November.
o Save one file with all the pages in it as one document for the word counting. Don’t mess around with this business of saving chapters and adding it up. When you do this, there’s a panicky moment at 10pm on November 30 th when you need to upload your document and you can’t find some 3,000 words. Because the file’s been saved in some weird place on your hard drive, and you can’t figure out where it is. Have your backup file be one big long document. Save it on a disk. If it gets to big for one disk, two would be okay, but more than that is pushing it.
o It was a really good idea. I did have to push myself a little more than I normally would have to get finished in time, and I think that’s good. The expert panels on the NaNo boards were wonderful. They were a huge help with figuring out some specifics on genetics that I could have researched myself, but it would have taken me weeks to get the information that they were able to give me in a couple of days worth of waiting while I worked on other things. I’m definitely in for next year.
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