National Novel Writing Month 2007: A Retrospective

This year I completed National Novel Writing Month for the 3rd year in a row, out of 4 years of participation. Writing 50,000 words of fiction over the course of a single month is a daunting and life changing experience. This post is somewhat a response to the withdrawal from writing that I, and many other NaNoWriMoers, feel immediately after the month of November ends.

This month I wrote a novel somewhat based off of my experiences so far at Brigham Young University – Idaho. Initially I was afraid that it might be too close to my actual life. I was right. At first, I found myself trying to not tell a lie. I eventually came around and decided that my character was his own person and that anything could happen.

I started out with the novel being a little mundane. It talked of the everyday life and occurrences in the dorm. Then it shifted. I found myself focusing more and more on the romantic life of the main character (probably because I don’t have one right now).

This year was a bit of a struggle for me. I didn’t get off to a good start. I got further and further behind on my word counts until Thanksgiving break. Once I got home for Thanksgiving break I found that I didn’t really have anything to do at home, so I would write 1667-3200 words a night. Unfortunately, that was not enough to catch up.

On November 25th, I found myself with 20,000 words left to write by the end of Friday night. It was then that I kicked it into high gear. For Monday and Tuesday I was making great strides. Then, on Wednesday, I had to go to the invited dress rehearsal of BYU-I’s production of Taming of the Shrew (by the way, it’s really good!). Then I had to work all night to finish a project for one of my English classes. I didn’t write anything that night.

This left me with a great burden. I had to write about 12-14,000 words between Thursday and Friday. So I did. On Thursday I wrote about 8,000 words. On Friday, I worked from a little after classes until about 10 at night to finish the final 6,000 or so, with only breaks for dinner and resting my hands.

There are several things that I need to say about my experience this year. It was at, like, 8 (or sometime like that) on Friday night that I finally knew how my book was going to end. It is a completely euphoric feeling. I had an indescribable amount of joy being able to picture the powerful final scene of my book. And I’d have to say that my final 600 words are some of the best I’ve ever written. I think a major part of that is that they are dialogue driven, when I used dialogue for probably 1-2% of the book.

This year I made a very deliberate effort to finish the story. (Thanks to Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problem! for teaching me to finish the story.) Out of the two other years that I have successfully completed NaNoWriMo, I never actually finished the storyline of the book. I had (rough guesstimate) 20-30% of the story left on each one. I never went back and finished those stories. I didn’t want to end up with another incomplete tale, so I accelerated the plot line at the end to get the story done. I had too much “filler” at the beginning, and no room for filler at the end.

This year was the first year that I typed my novel. In the past, I have written them in spiral bound notebooks, by hand. I counted the words by hand too. (By the way, don’t count words in the middle of writing for the day. Just learn about how many pages it needs to be.) This year, I have a laptop of my own, so I would just take it over to my bed and write while sitting in bed, leaning against the wall. Writing with a laptop without Internet access is a very liberating experience. It is like writing in a notebook, so the ideas just flowed to me. I could have my music playing from the laptop while I was writing, so I didn’t need to have a separate MP3 player or anything (though I ended up mainly using the playlist of all the songs I transferred to my MP3 player).

The main advantage of a laptop though was speed. When writing by hand, I would top out at about 1000 words an hour. (Yeah, I was booking it!) It would take 1 1/2 to 2 hours of my time every night to do the novel. This year, I would max out at about 2000 words an hour, and unless I was really tired or distracted, I would at least hit the 1667 for a day in about 1 hour. Using a laptop saved me so much time, plus I don’t have to type it up later. (I’ve never typed up all of my hand written novels.) One more advantage of a laptop: I know for sure that I hit 50,000 words. In the past, I’ve counted words by hand and validated by just using a public domain book of approximately the same number of words that I though I had, but I can’t ever be sure that I actually hit the 50k mark. This year, I know for sure that I got 50,055 words. (My NaNo profile says 50,056. Word 2007 says 50,055, NaNo validator says 50,056. Whatever.)

Another lesson of novel writing I learned this past month is that word count marathons are just extremely fun. The last two days were probably two of the best days of the month. For one, I didn’t have to feel guilty about not writing my novel, because that’s just about all I was doing. For another, it becomes easy to lose yourself in the story. And that’s OK. It’s also nice to keep momentum up. It’s hard to continue writing when you skipped a day. It takes more time to get back into the flow of things.

About my final scene: I really like it. I think with a little editing, I would easily classify it as the best piece of writing I’ve ever done. I think I’ll need to make it a little shorter. I found myself putting in filler to make it reach the 600 more words I needed to win NaNoWriMo. If I could cut it in about half, it would be so much more powerful. In my final scene’s case, less is more.

I think the final thing that I want to talk about is the 2nd half of my book vs. the first. Particularly the final 20,000 words. I found it easier to write once I got back to college after Thanksgiving break. It was then that I really switched the gears of the book from being about a bunch of crazy dorm guys to being a story of courtship between my main character and a young lady. It was then that I found myself actually being interested in my story and wanting to see things work out completely well. Before that I had my main character in spots of trouble regarding women. Once I had him focus on just one girl, everything just fell into place and things worked out so great between them. Particularly the final scene.

One reason why I’m not giving more firm of numbers in the plot points is that I have set a personal moratorium on looking at the novel. I am not going to look at my novel until Friday, one week after the final day of NaNoWriMo. The only exception was to post the novel to a WordPress blog as a backup. (Don’t bother looking for it. The URL is easy if you look at my novel’s title on my author profile, but I have the entire thing set to private so you have to log in as me to view it. Ha ha ha.)

A few final notes regarding life post NaNoWriMo this year. I hear Lulu.com isn’t doing the free copy of your manuscript thing again this year. I must admit that I am a little disappointed to hear that. I guess I will have to go to the university copy center and have them print it on 8 1/2 X 11 sheets and bind it. (By the way, the total running length of the novel is 86 pages, letter size.) That’ll set me back $10-$15, but it will be completely worth it.

One final piece of advice. If you do NaNoWriMo, make sure to tell anyone and everyone. Because I told many people, I had people asking me on a regular basis about how things were coming along. This forced me to finish so that I wouldn’t have to face their ridicule. This tactic really works. Again, thanks to No Plot for that piece of advice. Special thanks to my special guilt monkey this year: Carlton and Bro. Cameron. Carlton’s proddings especially made me feel guilty.

I have done NaNoWriMo for 4 years straight now and it just seems to get better and better. Over the last 4 years I have written approximately 180,000 words of fiction because of it. I feel terrific because I do the impossible on an annual basis and it’s exciting every single time. If I do NaNo again next year, I will have participated for a full half of its entire history. That will be a proud day for me. I just hope that I can continue going for many years to come.

(One final final note. I promise. If you participated in NaNoWriMo and haven’t donated, please do. You owe it to them for showing you that the impossible is possible. This is doubly true if you won. I donated $10 tonight simply because I feel I owe it to them for all that they’ve given me, indirectly, over the past 4 years.)

And now this post is officially longer than the 1667 daily word count that needs to be achieved to win NaNoWriMo. This took me, all told, probably a little over an hour. It would have taken me less, but this I had to think about because it isn’t straight off the top of my head.