NaNo Postmortem Post (Numbers, Tips, and Plans)

In brief: I did it. 50,000 words in one month—actually, 62,006 words—were done. By me!

It’s completely unexpected, and delightful, but not the golden promised land of a happy ending I…was never actually promised.

Caveat: some wordcount came from revising (and expanding, and finishing) scenes I started writing last NaNo. But to make up for that, I went 12k words above the minimum to “win”, and I’m sure I wrote less than 12k of the scenes in question last year, since NaNo 2017 only produced something like 22,000 words. (Only. Pah.)

My favorite part of doing NaNo is posting the numbers, so here’s lots of numbers:

First, for the contemporary project—it’s New Adult, which is new for me, and it’s femdom, which is not unlike me at all (of course, it’s high time I wrote a femdom novel! That’s how this wound up as a NaNo project): I wrote just under 19,000 words this November. Because I’d written some other chapters previously, it’s about 28,000 words total. Since the projected final length is around 80k, this is a significant start!

The historical M/M project, one of those 16th century plot bunnies that could not be stopped, is about 40,500 words longer than it was on October 30—and, since I started writing Chapter One of it a month before that, it’s currently 49,900 words long. The projected final length is also about 80k, so let’s say I’m halfway through (uniquely, I expect it to get shorter by editing; plus there are 30+ “TX” notes where I have historical info to look up later).

I also completed and sent off a short story, total length 7000 words (exactly; it took editing to stay within the limit!) of which…enough were written during Nano to make all the other numbers here add up to 62,006, at least.

I surprised myself by reaching natural pause points in both of the novel WIPs: after one couple broke up and the other couple got together for the first time, respectively.

The next step is, of course, to finish them. Up front that means outlining the next chapters—I have detailed notes for each project, but currently their outlines resemble amorphous blobs with lots of navel-gazing about character motivation. I need to consider ways to turn that into scenes.

I’m glad this is the next step and I don’t need to worry about editing or (shudder) publication just yet. (Well, if you spot a market for post-apocalyptic romance novelettes, shout my way.)

Takeaways: writing takes so much TIME. On average, I logged 1,000 words an hour. That seems slow—that is slow when you’re a self-employed service provider, ie someone who makes a living by selling your time. I took a pay cut to do this NaNo (by setting aside time for this personal project that I could have used on client projects). It’s one I’m lucky enough to be in a position to afford, but still, this would be an expensive hobby to keep up, to say the least. And I’ve got at least 100 more hours to go just to finish the first drafts (on second thought, that sounds low—inclusive of outlining I must be doing far less than 1k per hour, even if a given hour when the stars align turns out 2,500 words).

One of the biggest benefits of NaNo is also one I get from Write 1, Sub 1: I am now confident that when I sit down to write, I will write. When at the beginning of the week I decide I want to write 3500 words, I will write 3500 words that week. The words are not in front of me right now, but I will find them.

I know what the process feels like. You sit down. You find something to say. You figure out what to say next. You say it. It reminds you of what else you want to say. You keep going. Sometimes you need to pause to find the next thing; you will find it. And you write, because you keep finding what to say next, sometimes until your laptop battery is drained and your muscles ache. When you’re really finding the words you want to say next, you can block out annoying and mysterious environmental sounds, you can forget the carbs you have cooking on the stove (finally a solution to avoid my pasta being too al dente!). It’s worth it.

The joke about writers being like, “Yeah, my cat ran away, my house burned down, but I wrote 500 words today so it was good!”…is not really a joke. It was striking how much more peaceful I felt after having written something each day—for the most part; there were also days I wrote a lot and still wound up feeling defeated. But less defeated, probably, than if I hadn’t written.

Plus I found myself looking forward to writing: I was eager to write the next scene, even if I had to beg, borrow, and steal time to do it.

Tips and tools I found: the “TX” notes mean that when I come up against something I don’t know (how did Elizabethans say hello? Is this guy a Master or Mister or a Goodman? Which part of the churchyard would this guy have been buried in and would he have a monument?) I write something like “{tx say hello in Elizabethan}” or “{Master? TX}.” The letters “TX” don’t appear otherwise in the manuscript—or in most English-language manuscripts, unless characters are mailing things to Texans—so it’s easy to track down these notes with the Find tool. And I’ll do that when I edit. This was mostly for the historical; in the femdom novel, if I needed to know someone’s job or name or the term for a thing, I looked it up or made it up on the spot. Both strategies worked well—notably, it’s easier to pull up a name generator online than it is to quickly look up the details of 16th century burial practices.

I also talked a bit about my “arc word” strategy here on Tumblr. Note that I’m still semi-ironic about using it, and it’s something you should be using once every other chapter, not twice every page (I mean, you can use it twice every page, but it’ll be hell to edit and frankly that would seem like a sign of deeper problems with bringing the story together).

Also, yes, I outline. I could not write without outlines, any more than I can operate in life without a calendar and to-do list. Specifically, I “zeroth draft”. I wrote about how I do it here but really, whatever works for you works. If what you’re doing isn’t working, give something else a try next NaNo!

One other tip I’ve picked up, including but not only from Julia Cameron, is to “hold nothing back” (Anne Dillard puts this as “spend it all”). Basically, while I did keep surprises up my sleeve, because certain mysteries and revelations needed to be maintained, I did not try to be coy—hiding everything leads to dull scenes and confused readers. Each POV character’s feelings and the reasons for them were clear to the reader, and even sometimes to other characters. Backstory was sprinkled in when appropriate. I added symbols and I even explained what the symbols meant. Foreshadowing was known to occur. I can always delete stuff later, but one major benefit of not holding back: my “big” revelation scenes had a lot more strength when they were building off of things characters had already felt or expressed in earlier scenes. Instead of going from a 0 to 3 on a given theme, I went from a 3 to a 5 to a 10 in successive chapters.

I am extremely impatient with repetition in the books I read, but I threw that to the winds here. Again, I can always take stuff out later! If I say something 5 times in the book, I can delete 3 instances more easily than I can find/insert the right time to say it once afterward if it went unsaid in the first draft. But thinking about how I will edit is still…not a pretty picture. I love editing, but it takes. So much. TIME. (I’ll be seeking beta readers down the line, so feel free to message me if you’re interested, but I have to complete the first draft and at least one self-editing pass before I can show anyone else any of this.)

Next year’s NaNo? Hell yeah. I already have plans for the 2 stories I want to try next year (a haunted house piece and a “fix-up” of several connected short stories. Oh, I also have another femdom novel idea, but its outline turned into an OT3 and currently scares me too much to start writing. Obviously, I can approach it better after finishing a different femdom novel first). Now, it might seem reckless to juggle too many stories at once–but holding the intention of working on a story for a year or more gives me time to build up my outline/zeroth draft, and in fact I think it’s a major reason why the historical novel was so prolific this November: I’ve been building up my thoughts & intentions toward it for 13 months now, even though I didn’t start really writing until September 30. So something similar may be in play here. Assuming I can finish one or both of the novels I started this NaNo before next November.