Around five years ago, in a fit of optimism, I’d signed up for NaNoWriMo. For those of you who are unaware of what NaNoWriMo stands for, it’s the National Novel Writing Month which takes place in November every year. There is a website you go to and register your intent to write 50,000 words come hell or high water. Much like most of my ventures at that time, I just blundered into it, hoping that somehow, miraculously, I’d have a 50,000 words manuscript at the end of the month. Well, as you can imagine, that did not go well. I don’t think I even wrote a sentence, procrastinating, until I knew that I’d never really had any intention of writing that novel at all.
What changed in 2020? Well, apart from the obvious, I am no longer that wide-eyed ingenue to the world of writing. I know now that writing a book is hard graft, day after day, draft after draft. I am five books in, and greyer and wiser alongside. This time the intent and the determination were real. The idea was bubbling inside for a while, a rough draft forming itself in anticipation of November 1st. So, I got to work.
This is my first full-length novel. My previous books have all been collections of short stories and one novella. The initial challenge I had to overcome was whether I even had it in me to write a book of that length. This is where the wonderful writing software of Scrivener came to my rescue. Having heard so much about it over the years in writing communities, I took the plunge prior to November and bought and installed Scrivener on my computer. (There is also a free version to try, if you’re leery of investing too much at the start). This enabled me to create parts, chapters and sections. Why would that make it any easier, you ask? Because I could then treat each section as a short story that added to the larger story I was trying to tell. Short stories I have a handle on. That I can do. Breaking down a mammoth task into small, manageable bite-size pieces helped me hugely in overcoming my initial fear.
The second thing that I kept reminding myself of was Terry Pratchett’s famous quote – “The first draft is just you telling yourself the story”. Unwieldy, long-winded, my first draft was anything but the vision of the book I wanted to produce. But it was this quote that kept me going. I was telling myself a story I already knew, but even so, the story kept surprising me by the twists and turns it would take completely organically.
For novices, a book that is recommended almost everywhere is Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. This isn’t a book about the craft of writing, as much as it is about how to go about it. King is a famous pantser, and he talks about uncovering your story as you would uncover a fossil – delicately, gently, without applying the force of a jackhammer. Similarly, your story will reveal itself bone by bone as long as you are determined to keep working at it.
Now, not everyone is as good at creating something out of nothing. There are three broad categories of writers: Pantsers, Plotters and Plantsers. Pantsers are like King who start off with no plan in mind, but chip away at the dirt to discover the fossil of their novel. Plotters, on the other hand, have a detailed map of where they are headed, with road markings, rest stops and final destination clearly marked out. They may veer off course occasionally, but will always right themselves and proceed the way they’d intended to go from the very start. Then there is me. I am a plantser, and I dare say, a lot of new writers do begin this way. So, we have a rough plot in mind and a vague destination, but what we put between the start and the stop of a novel is a mix of planned and unplanned events, situations and character traits. Nothing wrong with any of these methods. Some might require heavier editing than others, but remember the important thing is to get the words written. As another famous quote says: “You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” -Jodi Picoult.
What about that ubiquitous excuse that everyone has? “I don’t have the time!” Well, guess what? Most of us don’t. Most of us have full-time jobs alongside being writers. Not all my readers know what I do for a living, but suffice it to say, it involves a lot of travel, jet lag and fatigue. And I still found time to sit and write my 50,000 words. It really is about commitment, and I should know. During my first abortive attempt, I’d used the same excuses. But here’s the thing, if it’s important to you, you’ll find a way to do it. You’ll create the time, even if it’s stealing 15 minutes here or there. I was listening to this wonderful podcast on which a writer by the name of Honoree Corder was being interviewed about her book ‘The Nifty 15: Write your book in just 15 minutes a day!’ and she talked about how it was entirely possible to do this. Fifteen minutes may not seem like a long time, three hundred words may not seem a lot, but remember everything adds up. You’re working towards your goal, and it may take you longer than say a person writing 2000 words a day, but if you keep plugging at it, you’ll get there too!
Having been a blogger for over seven years now, a habit I had to get rid of while doing NaNoWriMo, is the constant need to self-edit. Blogging has been a wonderful start to my writing career, and it was how I first created a platform where readers discovered my writing, but it’s a completely different medium of work from writing a book. For one thing, a blog is nowhere near as long as a book. Duh! You say. But that was the problem for me. Whenever I wrote a blog post, I would keep going over it multiple times to catch any spelling or grammatical errors. Now imagine doing that with a novel as it progresses. You’d get so caught up in the weeds, you’d never move forward. I kept reminding myself that any and all corrections could be done at the editing stage. This freed me from the fear of having to go over what I’d written previously, and just carry on with the story I was trying to tell.
But what if my muse is lazy, or absent on a particular day, you ask? I cannot tell you the number of times that my muse has taken herself off on a vacation without informing me. On those days, I still show up at my laptop and write. I may not always produce my best work, but write I will. Somewhere in all that drivel will be that fossil I will uncover, slowly and painstakingly. I don’t discount muses and writer’s blocks, but what I have learned is that these can be the hooks we hang our fears on. Get rid of the hooks and the fears might disappear too.
You don’t need a study overlooking a beautiful garden. You don’t need a quiet spot, a particular time, a rainy day. What you need, and what you already possess, is your imagination. Some of my best writing has been accomplished facing a brick wall in an anonymous hotel room. Sometimes, I have focused intensely amid noise and chaos. Not always, but it is possible. Once again, how badly do you want to write your novel?
NaNoWriMo is like a marathon. It is word after word after word, until you are in a state of flow, where suddenly everything is happening at warp speed, all the outside world is blocked out and you can barely feel the effort or the pain, all you feel is the exhilaration of being in the moment and the joy of accomplishment.
I am no authority on writing, but these are the lessons I learned not just in November, but in the years and months prior as well. “Get your butt in that chair and write!” exhorted a fellow writer at a conference I attended last year. That’s what 2020 and November have been about. No opportunity has been too little, no task too large. I’ve written for the joy of it, and I’ve written because ultimately, whether or not my manuscript sees the light of day, I now know what I am capable of.
So, bonne chance, any budding writers out there who have wondered if they can tackle NaNoWriMo. If I can do it, so can you.
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ―
