Nick Bryan

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo 2012: The Halfway Point

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You may remember my blog post of a fortnight ago, where I unveiled my plans for NaNoWriMo 2012. Well, I’ve done some writing today, so have time to post a midway update. As I slap this up on the blog, at nearly-midnight on the fifteenth, NaNo is exactly halfway over.

So, how am I doing? How are you doing? How are our friends and families doing?

Quality Over Quantity – The Reality

As I said in the previous entry, I’ve been promising myself I’d slow my NaNo pace, accept a lower word count in exchange for a more considered plot, better prose and, y’know, actual themes and shit. Most previous years, I have made this vow and failed, allowing myself to be caught up in the competitive rush to 50K, and “won”.

Well readers, I’m proud to announce this sickening run of success and achievement is definitely over now. Unless I completely lock myself indoors for the remainder of the month, I’m not going to hit fifty thousand. But I am fairly pleased with what I’ve written so far, a mere fifteen thousand.

As the properly NaNo-brained of you already know, that is a fair way below the proper midway target of twenty-five thousand. But the writing itself doesn’t suck, I’m pleased. Still hoping to finish the first major segment of my novel, too.

How To Fail Gloriously

So, have I learnt anything, aside from accepting non-success?

To be honest, my main lesson was one I’d suspected from the start: for me at least, planning is key. I’m trying to produce something with themes, threads and an interesting plot, mostly to avoid having to ram them in later. These do not tend to appear by themselves.

Not that making it up as you go along, then going back and editing heavily once you’ve worked out what the book’s actually about, isn’t a valid approach – it’s just I’m a little tired of having to rewrite NaNo novels basically from scratch before I can read them without wanting to cry in a bin.

Maybe finishing that Creative Writing MA has left me with a new sense of quality control, who knows. Or I just spent enough time sobbing in skips whilst finishing my thesis. One or the other. (I got a merit in the MA, by the way. Which means graduation! Party time.)

Anyway, based on boring multiplication, I should finish out the month at around thirty thousand. Check back in early December to see whether I got anywhere near it.

All NaNo’s Eve – Belated NaNoWriMo Prep 2012

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I’ve been slack on blogging of late, due to moving house and devoting my typing time to working on the actual stories, rather than masturbatory writing about writing. (Also, September/October means a lot more TV reviews.) See the picture to the right for an illustration of my housemove, doubling as a metaphor for writer’s block.

But it’s nearly November, which means NaNoWriMo, and writing bloggers across the world breathe a sigh of glorious relief. Because, hey, no need to think of a topic for the next few weeks. Just start with NaNo and go from there!

And I’m not one to turn down easy inspiration, especially because it’s the 31st October (Happy Halloween!) and I haven’t done a shred of planning yet. Or even decided my exact approach. So, let’s talk about that. (This blog post totally isn’t an excuse to put off planning. Shut up.)

Length Vs Garbage

Last November, I decided to work on 50k worth of short stories, rather than add to my pile of unfinished novel drafts. It felt good at the time, although I haven’t yet finalised or sold any. Mostly because I’ve spent the bulk of this year finalising my novel from NaNo 2010.

So, this year, back to basics. After months punching and hacking at the same wall, I desperately want to feel the warm, damp flow of actual creativity again, so time for a new book. To be precise, a massive expansion of a story I wrote last November. See how everything’s connected?

Not for the first time, I’m aiming to focus on quality over quantity this year, and settle for less than the regulation 50k, if it means I produce better work. I’m pretty sure I’m a better writer thanks to the MA, so want to create something that doesn’t require rewriting from scratch later.

Of course, I may still get swept up in the competitive rush, produce 50k anyway, then delete the last fifth for being garbage. Again.

Planning Vs Pantsing

There’s been discussion in the NaNo community about planing lately, as you’d expect. In particular, planning vs “pantsing” – the art of making it up as you go along. (For more about pantsing, see this blog post on the NaNo London site. Contains no actual pants.)

There’s a lot of pantsing in NaNo, and I don’t just mean systematic American-style bullying. You’re writing at speed, the word quotas are terrifying, stopping for an evening to re-assess your plan means over 3,000 words tomorrow, so tempting to just power through.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen what happens when I power through. It leads to rambled, clunky sentences, endless funny-but-needless dialogue and characters enacting convoluted schemes instead of the obvious simple solution, which I was too hurried to realise. In short, all the things I’m trying to avoid. Pantsing may work for some, but I need a plan. It’s nearly midday on the last day of October and I don’t have one.

Gosh, I wonder what I’ll be doing this afternoon. Blogs will hopefully happen sporadically during the month, depending on level of panic, etc. London people, I will be attending at least some of the meets organised by the nice NaNo London folk (especially the All-Nighter, because it’s fun). Non-Londoners, I imagine it will be mentioned on my Twitter. And, y’know, those of you doing NaNo… how’s the planning going? Anyone else doing it in a rush this afternoon?

Script Frenzy 2011 – Preamble

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Yes, it’s time for a non-story blog post. I am (probably) going to be doing Script Frenzy in April, so I thought I would do a nice intro to it. After all, Script Frenzy is the scripting equivalent of NaNoWriMo, and I did a preamble blog for them.

Script Frenzy requires I produce 100 pages of script in a month, which doesn’t sound too hard. After all, I wrote a sitcom script a couple of months back, and ended up producing 35 pages in less than three days, so I’m going into this primarily with the attitude that it’ll be a fun aside that won’t dominate my life.

If it does take over my writing time completely, I will probably ditch it and focus on the novel, but I have found a scripting project I actually want to do, so hopefully this won’t be too futile. I have a novel I wrote for NaNo a few years back which I thought might make a decent comic book. (Or “graphic novel” if you’re unwilling to admit you read comics.)

Thus I’ll be attempting the adaptation process. This carries the added bonus of not requiring a new idea, only a bit of re-planning.

Fans of this website will be sad to hear it may stop me producing Friday stories during the month of April, sorry about that. I may attempt some blog posts about Script Frenzy; if not, there will definitely be updates on my Twitter. Oh, and if you too are doing Script Frenzy, feel free to add me as a “Writing Buddy” or whatever people do.

NaNoWriMo – Afterthoughts

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A while ago now, I wrote a post saying I was considering doing NaNoWriMo in November. As you’ll probably know if you read my Facebook/Twitter updates in that period, or even spoke to me in real life (gasp), I ended up doing it. And then, I “won” it.

Not just based on the criteria outlined in that original post, no, I ended up doing the full fifty thousand. Why? Do I regret it? Did I learn anything? Well, in order to make my post understandable in an increasingly short-spanned world, I have broken this down into three points.

1) I need a better laptop.

Not the most interesting of discoveries, but probably the most important. My laptop, for those who haven’t encountered it, is massive, old and was bought on eBay for less than a hundred pounds about five years ago, so could well be approaching its tenth birthday. Here’s a picture of said laptop compared to a lovely modern MacBook Air.

Performance-wise, it does suffice, since it can run Word as long as I don’t use anything else at the same time. In terms of concentrating on my writing, this could be a good thing.

The reason it may get pensioned off anyway is the battery-life, which is non-existent. Once removed from power, we’re talking minutes. This was tolerable most of the time, as when I went to these communal writing events, other people had power extensions, but sometimes, major inconvenience to myself or others was caused. If I’m going to continue going to such things post-NaNo (and I might), it’s time to upgrade.

2) Other NaNo people are, it turns out, pleasant

So, yeah, I actually went to those meet-ups and it turns out other people who do NaNo in London are friendly. I’ve done the challenge a few times before, but usually as an exercise in typing away in isolation, with slight encouragement from my friend up the road.

Well, said friend dropped out of any kind of competition after about a week this year, and has also moved to Oxford, so I thought it might be interesting to go and encounter others. Not to mention, at the time I was still entirely unemployed and looking for any encouragement to stop procrastinating.

And yes, everyone was welcoming, I eventually learnt people’s names and have a few new people to talk to on Twitter, and what more could you want from anything? (If you’re me and have a skewed sense of priorities.) Oh, and one of them ended up getting a job in my office. See, if I hadn’t socialised during NaNo, an aspiring author in London might still be unemployed.

3) I also did some actual writing

Yeah, the part where I wrote fifty thousand words. As I muttered in the previous blog post, I was going to try some kind of quality-over-quantity drive, in which I produce less at a more focused speed. That obviously went out the window in the latter days, especially the final few in which I wrote approximately five thousand words each day.

Does this mean the last 15K or so will just be deleted? Very possibly. I have shown a range of earlier chapters to people and had varying feedback (ranging from “this is really good” to “this is awful, just start again”), so there will be extensive re-writes. But I am aiming to try and keep a more ongoing rewrite process going, and end up with something that doesn’t need as many years of edits to become worthwhile.

Having said all that, I have been utterly fatigued since finishing. This and the last three or four Dork Adore reviews have been the only writing I’ve really done. I’m hoping to get back into it soon, though. We’ll see. It was definitely a positive experience, anyway.

And congrats to anyone who stuck with the whole of this blog post. More to the point, congrats to anyone who took part in NaNo, win or lose. It was a good time.

NaNoWriMO – Vascillation Continues

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I’ve been back and forth on doing NaNoWriMo in 2010 for some time now. It is always fun, but also stressful, life-consuming and tends to leave me with manuscripts that are based on decent ideas, but not really well written enough to do anything with. At least, not without ridiculously extensive editing.

Around two weeks ago, I concluded I’d probably try and get a chunk of words done on a new novel in November, but would have to play somewhat fast and loose with the official NaNo rules. I’ve always done this anyway, as I never actually finish the stories in the allotted 50,000 words.

So, I have made up some ridiculously complex personalised rules for myself. I won’t bore you with them, but it involves trying to do about 1,000 words a day, then read over them to make the writing less clunky. And if I miss a day, so be it. No cumulative backlog power-dumps.

This means I’m likely to end up writing… maybe 25 – 30,000 words at an absolute maximum? Which, by NaNo standards, is crap, but is a decent chunk on a new novel and might help me decide if this story idea is working. And hopefully they will be words I don’t venomously hate.

So, yeah, I’m doing NaNoWriMo very badly. Good luck to those of you doing it properly and if you wish to add me on the official NaNoWriMo site, feel free.

(Also, I’m so busy tomorrow with regular blogging/MA stuff that I may not even get my words done. On the first day. This hardly bodes well.)