total word count • reports from the trenches • calendar • planning
Am I crazy? Quite possibly. But you see, I just read this book by Chris Baty, called No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days, and he made it sound like such manic fun, I knew I had to give it a shot.
If you are interested in the book, here's a link to Amazon. Chris Baty also has a site for National Novel Writing Month, which is in November (an event he founded).
I'll be posting my progress on this page in the coming month.
So far, I've written 50,052 words. I've completed 100% of my first draft!
June 30. Day two of life after. Last night and this morning I started and finished The Unvanquished by William Faulkner. It amazes me that a book that chock-full of awkward sentence structures, stilted dialogue, and bare-comprehensible explosition can be so compelling.
When I was brushing my teeth this morning, without really being consciously aware of it at first, I started thinking about another novelish story I could tell, and mentally drawing out the first thin, sketchy plotlines. It's as though going on this crazy children's-crusade venture into novel writing has opened up some conduit in my head, or else drawn the attention of some swarm of external forces, spirits or ideas that have now shown up demanding that I funnel them through this process next, jostling one another for the next place in line.
June 29. Day one of life after my novel-writing challenge. I slept in until 6 a.m., and wrote about four paragraphs in my journal.
June 28. I finished it. I crossed the 50,000-word mark and typed "The End." I did it with two days to spare. Whoo-whoo!
I feel sort of dazed. In some ways, the process was like climbing a mountain only to reveal the entire range of mountains spread out beyond this one. But it's still really good, because I didn't really think I could actually make it to the top of this mountain and write a story this long and involved, even to get the bare bones down on paper. I also (re)learned the happiness of just plain doing the work. And I'd better enjoy that, because it may be my only reward, along with any other intrinsic things. And,of course, bragging rights.
I can also see now why creative writing teachers don't necessarily want to deal with novels-in-progress with students. If the students are starting from scratch, they don't necessarily get far enough in the course of the semester for the teacher to be especially helpful; too far along, and they've already committed themselves to going down a specific path, and may be too attached to that path to consider alternative ideas for revision. On the other hand, if I got to the point where I thought, "This is as good as I can make it on my own, but I'm still not satisfied," then that would be the ideal place to get help.
June 27. Wrote a solid thousand words this morning before work, and am having fun with some of the concert scenes—and the climactic scene with Lori and Fran, the two main characters. Fun, fun, fun.
Did another after-dinner writing session while Sheila and Nikki went to the movies, and passed the 45K mark. Rockin'! That's 157 manuscript page. In twenty-seven days. Pretty amazing to me, anyway, especially since I'm used to poetry, a form in which something is long when it goes beyond a single page. I'm taking tomorrow off from work, and hope to reach 50,000 by the end of the day. Excitement!
June 26. Got a yen with all this music stuff with the novel, and dug out my two favorite Melissa Etheridge albums, her second and third, when her chops were at their peak, when she was cocky and not rehashing her past success. Still there is an essentially cheesy element to her music—can’t go back home, not after sixteen years—and some of the hip-hop-inflected drumbeats are feeling pretty stale at this point. Still, “Ain’t It Heavy” is still a fairly righteous track. I wonder how tall Melissa Etheridge is, anyway. One of those things that Google was made for, right?
According to random information on the web, she’s five foot three. Teeny. Doesn’t surprise me. Anyway, the novel is going great, and I had a 5,500-word day today. Whee!
June 24. Getting back in the swing. I wrote 3,000 words yesterday, and 1,000 this morning, so as long as I can keep plugging away, I'll be all right. My two days spent flat on my back were useful in that I did a lot of daydreaming about the novel, thinking big-picture about how all of its pieces work together. So I'm not in a panic or anything, but am highly motivated to keep going and make my goal of 50,000 words by the stroke of midnight on June 30/July 1.
June 23. Disaster struck! I feel like I’m traveling in one of those little plastic cars on the Life gameboard, and have to go back three spaces. Okay, it wasn’t really disaster, but I threw out my back on Monday, and haven’t been able to work on the novel at all until a few hundred words yesterday (Wednesday), AND I started off with a bit of a deficit before that, so it looks like this will be one of those come-from-behind victories. I need to write 2,500 words a day, at least, to hit my goal, starting today and going through the 30th.
June 17. Still trucking along. Work and home life have both been busy, so I had a 1,000 word day yesterday, and another one today. Luckily, I've scheduled another writing day on Monday, so I can get ahead again and keep rolling. I seem to have settled into some kind of groove, where I spent the first five or ten minutes sort of casting around in the story, looking for where I've left loose ends that I can start up again (each labeled helpfully with "START HERE" so I can just do a "find" and pick up where I left off), and deciding which loose end I want to work on (or start another one). So my novel seems to be growing mostly from the middle, or in bits here and there, rather than just progressing in a linear fashion. My notes file now has a timeline so I can keep track of major events and when they happen (most of the novel takes place in a three-month period, but there are flashbacks that go back up to twelve years earlier), and it even has a seating chart for a more complicated scene with a lot of characters in it, so I can keep track of who is where.
June 15. My word count crested over 25,000 today: 25,021, to be precise, as of 7:11 a.m. That’s 87 pages in two weeks and one day. Amazing. Of course, it is a first draft, so there will be lots of cleanup, expansion, and reconfiguration needed to make it shipshape, but there is a lot there that’s good, I think, and it’s a great learning experience. I can tell when I write a scene that’s under-dramatized and needs to be fleshed out more later (and will leave myself a note to that effect in ALL CAPS in the text, so I can go back later and do it), and can tell which characters need more development (at this point, just about everyone, but especially the two main characters need a LOT of development). I’m still having fun with the project.
June 12. Yesterday I had a 3,000 word day, which is important, because it has gotten me a little further back on track. I did 1,000 words at home, then I took my laptop to La Prima Tazza, which is an excellent joint to work in except that the tables are wobbly and small. I did another 1,000 words there. Then when my meter was about to run out, I abandoned my table, restocked the meter, and hit the Borders cafe instead, where I scored a table that had an outlet nearby (another shortcoming of the otherwise perfect window seat I'd gotten at Prima Tazza—no outlet), so I could charge up while I was working, and got over the hump to 15,000 total words. My goal is to have another two 3,000 word days, today and Monday, so I can get out of my word count deficit. For all the literary afficionados out there, yes, this is about quantity, not quality. This is about making sure I keep pressing forward and don't self-edit the first draft out of existence. That's what the word-count pressure is for.
June 10. Okay, I really feel like I'm in the trenches now. I took two days off from writing, and started back in this morning with some renewed seriousness. I'm also taking Monday off from work so I can get caught up, and perhaps a bit ahead. Last night I didn't write a word on the manuscript, but spent a lot of time writing out notes about where I was going next with the story, and what I wanted to focus on, which I think paid off.
June 7. In a departure from my usual routine, I didn't write much this morning, maybe just a hundred words or so. But I did some re-reading, and rearranging of some scenes, which helped me get to where I could move forward again this evening, when I did more drafting, and introduced a few more peripheral characters. How many characters does one need to introduce in a novel? Is it a cast of dozens? I'm literally making all of this up as I go along, so it will be a learning experience for sure. I can always consolidate characters later on. Anyway, after a bit of a struggle, I made my daily word count after dinner. Yay!
June 6. After my big word count day on Thursday, I took it relatively easy on Friday and Saturday, writing-wise, so by Sunday I was in the hole, and needed a 3,000+ word day. Luckily, my very understanding family (i.e., Sheila) took up the slack in the household chores and yardwork, which freed me to get down to bidness with this book! Then this morning (Monday) I was back in my usual routine, up around 5 a.m., writing until about 7 a.m., and made my daily minimum. At this point, I'm working on fleshing out a lot of the settings and some of the characters, and have a basic idea of the conflict between the main characters (I know what the conflict is, but not necessarily why it is or how it came about).
June 3. Rocking and rolling! I got to 4865 words last night. I wish I could say it was through perserverence and brilliance, but it was actually because there were some scenes I'd written long ago that never developed into stories, and I realized they would go perfectly in this story. So I spent most of the time rewriting those (both were in the first person; changed one to third and left one in the first, but that may need to change later. Say it with me now: "It's a first draft!") scenes and plugging in some sketchy notes for additional scenes, a process I continued this morning.
June 2. Another good one, although I had to more consciously fight my inner editor and urge to go back immediately and reread, revise, and spend lots of time doing things other than writing! But I resisted the urge, and kept plugging along, savoring the joyful freedom of the first draft.
June 1. It's a good day. I was up at 5 and had my minimum daily word total done by 7. I'm going to try for a second session this evening, to try to build in some padding for later in the month when my excitement and enthusiasm start to wane a bit. But for now, I feel great, and think I should have done this a long time ago.
| Sun | Mon | Tues | Wed | Thurs | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1
Daily Total: 1,680 |
2 Daily Total: 4,865 |
3 Daily Total: 5,429 |
4 Daily Total: 5,429 |
|||
5 Daily Total: 8,360 |
6 Daily Total: 10,064 |
7 Daily Total: 11,684 |
8 Daily Total: 11,705 |
9 Daily Total: 11,705 |
10 Daily Total: 12,011 |
11 Daily Total: 15,004 |
12 Daily Total: 18,025 |
13 Daily Total: 22,021 |
14 Daily Total: 23,650 |
15 Daily Total: 25,021 |
16 Daily Total: 26,023 |
17 Daily Total: 27,230 |
18 Daily Total: 28,405 |
19 Daily Total: 29,011 |
20 Daily Total: 29,011 |
21 Daily Total: 29,011 |
22 Daily Total: 30,234 |
23 Daily Total: 33,019 |
24 |
25 Daily Total: 36,535 |
26 Daily Total: 42,071 |
27 Daily Total: 45,032 |
28 Daily Total: 50,052 |
29 |
30 |
According to The Rules, I'm not allowed to begin writing yet, but I can start thinking about my story, characters, plot, and so on, and make notes, outlines, and maps.
Whoo-whoo! Day One of pre-planning. I did some brainstorming in my daily morning writing about who my main characters might be and what might be driving forces in their lives. No, I'm not going to tell you about it yet; plots are best hatched in the dark, and I think that goes for characters, too. But a guitar may figure prominently in the proceedings, which will probably make Sheila happy.
Day Two, or should I say T minus 6 days? I'm getting nervous: can I settle on ONE story and KEEP TELLING IT for 30 days? And for 50,000 words? Well, why not? Sheila has said that I'm the perfect candidate for a project like this, I think because I can read a book, follow the directions, and just have faith that whatever it promises will be delivered.
The other prep work I've done is to start preparing my work area, including my electronic work area, for optimal writing activity. To that end, I've created a new page that my web browsers all default to when I open them: www.people.ku.edu/~kanning/novel/stop.html. I'm hoping for a very productive month.
This is the day before I start drafting the novel, and excitement is running high. I've been engaging in compulsive list-making; brainstorming about characters, setting, and major plot points; and doing lots of recreational reading, since I'm figuring I won't have time to do much of that for the next thirty days.
I also recently read an article by Sharyn McCrumb called "Of Time and the Writer," published in Writer's Digest in May 1998. (It's a good one—look it up if your library subscribes.) In it, she describes writing her first novel, in six weeks, while pregnant, when she already had one child, and was a graduate student taking two classes. The book was completed, sold, published and won an Edgar award. Here's an interesting quote from the article:
You need to know, though, that if you are an unpublished writer, you have more time now to write a book than you will ever have again. Trust me. I know. I am a fill-time writer now. I finished graduate school; quit my job; the baby is in fifth grade; and I promise you that I have less time to write now than I did during those six terrible weeks in 1987.
Word to the wise. So I'm going to focus on how much time I have as an unknown writer, and how much I can just enjoy the manic whirl of a massive project like this one, without fear of displeasing my reading public, alienating my agent, or pissing off my publisher—because I don't have any of those things yet. See you tomorrow with my first day's word count.