I wrote a book in a month
Okay I wrote FIRST DRAFT of my book in a month. But it’s still an accomplishment right?
I have managed to finish NANOWRIMO challenge for a third time. NANOWRIMO is an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month which is a challenge for writers (and non-writers and everybody in between) to write a novel in a month. It started in late 90s. They set the length to 50,000 words (the smallest amount of words for a book to be considered a novel). Usually it happens in November, but since I am still working on finishing my master’s degree, I use August instead.
This was my 3rd year, and I personally think the most successful one.
I want to share with you not only what I have learnt in this process, but also to show you my POV on this whole crazy process of getting to the 50,000th word. Since I wrote more than I expected here see and jump on section you would like to read: - My writing sessions - What have I learned (15 of my best aha-moments) - Interesting stuff I did for the book beside writing
My writing sessions looked like this:
I have a standing desk so each day I would sit/stand/sit/stand/dance/lay on the desk in some invisible pattern during 2 hour long session
I opened the google docs document - hit Command + Shift + C and checked in the dialog window that I want to see the number of words visible on the bottom of the screen all the time
When you divide the 50,000 words into 30 days it’s 1666 words per day more or less. I created a simple notion table, and at the end of each day I checked the checkbox
To keep myself motivated I wrote the number I need to achieve that day on a sticky note and sticked it to my monitor
Another way how I kept myself motivated was - I divided the number of words of that day into "chunks" of 100 words. I kept that on a sticky near by me.
I was trying very hard not to have "staring at the screen" time because I knew it would get me stuck by the computer for another hour, and since I have a social life (kinda) and an apartment that needs to be taken care of I got serious and just typed as crazy for the two hours.
My biggest aha moments:
I am capable of writing even tired, bored or out of ideas
This was something I did not expected. I am not much a person aching for doing hard things. Productivity and similar things, everything in my life is adjusted to my short attention span and laziness, so finalizing something as big as a book in 30 days was huge achievement for me. However I made it as easy as possible (see next bullet points).
Flow comes eventually
I have the book "Flow" on my TRL for a few eternities. And even though I haven’t read it I understand the basics. Most of the time when my creative juices aren’t doing what they should be, I just stop. But I could not do it during NANOWRIMO, because I needed the words! Otherwise on the day after I would have to write twice as much. So I just set the direction the story should go and kept typing- the stupidest shit really- like over-discribing the surroundings, or just skipping some scene completely, putting them into brackets and continue on something more delightful like absinth fairies in Absinth cans.
You can just start
I remembered I should do NANOWRIMO like 3 days before August 1st. So when the date came I just sat and wrote the first 1666 words. During the first week/ two weeks I had no clue what’s going to happen in the book as a whole - only that the main character is driving his car somewhere, and he will take a wrong turn, ending up in a fantasy city named Parafogs. From there most of the plot revealed itself during the writing, and I still have only the first draft (working on the second one tho!). So huge changes can still happen.
Let the "tutorial" book guide you
It’s amazing, No plot? No problem! check it out before you even start to think about doing NANOWRIMO. It guides you through the whole process, every day has at least a paragraph about what’s happening. My fave quotes:
- “For me the moral of the story is this: A rough draft is best written in the steam-cooker of an already busy life. If you have a million things to do, adding item number 1,000,001 is not such a big deal”
- “Ray Bradbury said it best: “Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.”
- “That first year I learned that writing a novel simply feels great. Slipping into “the zone”—that place where you become a passive conduit to a story—exercises your brain in weird, pleasant ways and just makes life a little bit more enchanted. No matter what your talent level, novel writing is a low-stress, high-rewards hobby.” - “And it’s taught me exactly which aspects of noveling I’m good at (coffee drinking and complaining) and what my weaknesses are (dialogue, character development, plot, etc.).”
- "Your first draft will look like every other firstborn. Pasty, hairless and utterly confused."
Writing is harder than everybody says
It took blood, sweat and tears to get the work done. But not actually. There were worse and better days. I skipped one but never two in a row and I always finished the word count on the second day. Sometimes (mainly when getting closer to the ending) I had to squeeze my imagination to do something, the characters disapproving and lazy. That were the times when I laid down on the desk. But finished the session anyway writing what I thought at the time would be the shittiest thing I ever wrote. After all it ended at least readable.
Writing is easier than everybody says
Even though I know writing is hard most of the time, when I shut down my "inner editor" (read the book to understand what I reference to) it just poured out of me. I haven’t edited a single thing in the end and send it to my friend to do the first read. She said she is very surprised that the story kind of makes sense even when it was really just me typing frantically for 2 hours a day without editing. It was such a fun also because I made the whole book very light-hearted and fantasmagoric so I could do anything and it would work just fine. It‘s just stuff happening in a world I have in my head.
I can write beginnings, I really suck at endings
A friend of mine who works at book publishing told me (after reading my first paragraph) something like "Wow this is very cool realbooklike first paragraph". Well, I also enjoyed writing the beginning much more. The ending- eh.
Real-book-stuff starts to happen around third week
Until then you should not be worried about.. anything in that matter. Just pick an idea, the main character, a setting and jump in!
It’s fun to take real people and turn them into side characters
I did this with every character in the book. Not only because it’s easy, but also it’s suuuch a fun. You can turn your best friends into buddies of the main character (and use their quirks getting on your nerves in there), pick the unpleasant lady working in your local supermarket (and make her bad witch). Just be sure to cover your tracks, so you won’t get fired after your boss reads about himself in your book.
Your book your rules
Something I feel is a lot under-estimated in writing by all writing people is- you can do whatever you want with your book and writing. You enjoy writing lengthy JaneAustinlike sentences? Do it. You like writing short funny scenes? Do it. There are no rules, no guilty pleasures. We are desperately trying to write for our audience, but the first draft is you telling yourself the story so just pour it out and the truth will appear (see point 15).
It doesn’t hurt to turn on the word count
I have seen it somewhere, that checking the word count every two minutes is contra-productive. Which I guess is true. However, in google docs you can turn it on and it’s showing all the time in the bottom of the screen. Talking about google docs...
Google docs is really good tool for writing (but do a backup on your computer)
We use google docs in university mostly for collaboration on projects. I am using it for writing because: - I can set the screen black and the text yellow so it reminds me of an old school tool I used to write in when I was like 13 (it was called Q10 and it has been shut down unfortunately) - I am using 3-4 devices during a day and it’s synced on all of them - There is word count in the bottom of the screen - When you hide most of the elements and set the mode to full screen you are left with this + the toolbar:
Keep notes in a separate file
I kept two google docs documents opened at the same time during the writing. (No other apps or browser tabs! No distraction!). Just the actual writing file and the notes. Not to destroy my flow, when I realize that I can use some idea sooner in the book (or later) I just quickly switched to another tab and added it as a bullet point in looong list. Later I added some divison because it was just too long.
Do it stupid, do it poorly
There is no grammar, nor proper language in my writing. Sometimes not even full sentences or fullstops. I wrote in my mother tongue and then translated only a few parts (see point 12) to see if it sounds good in English. As it usually works- in English somehow everything sounds better and it’s unfair for other languages.
The faster you write the more honest you are
I didn’t understand this when I first read Bradbury’s book about writing. But after NANOWRIMO I feel it totally makes sense:
In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. - Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You
Have fun with your writing! It’s only worth doing for the enjoyment. So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart DO..
Interesting things I did/will do beside writing:
I picked an idea that was laying in my mind for some time, however I never thought it would become a book, I wanted to do only a few comic strips for instagram. It was something I kept thinking about for a while, but I’ve never wrote even a letter for it.
I also decided to actually make it a printed book, and since this decision the work on it went a bit worse and tough. However I also made a "public" commitment to my friends who wants to read it. So I guess I have no other choice but to actually finish it or listen about it til the end of my days.
Stuff I decided I want to do now (let’s see how it will work further on):
I want my book to be soft cover - recently I noticed, that for some reason books got bigger and bigger not in thickness but in actual size but I am fan of the old tiny books with yellow paper you can fit in your pocket (Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett style), so I would like to keep it small (A5 biggest). Also my hand is falling apart after I read the giant books like after 20 minutes (and I go to gym so that’s not the trouble!)
I want a lot of illustrations - let’s be honest I just want to draw all the cutsie thingies I put in the book, and again - my book my rules! However for example Neil Gaiman said he made a reprint of his book Coraline with more modest and less child-like cover so people are not ashamed of reading it in public. And well.. I never even considered this to be a thing. I would not be ashamed to "read" even Where’s Waldo in public, so I fail to see the problem. But I AM going to the bookstore (yes using this as an excuse) to look at various book covers in sections with similar genre as is my book. It’s really hard though. I think my love for Neil Gaiman’s books reflects in my writing and he is also very not genre specific - as he wrote in his book "The View from the Cheap Seats"
“I get told—most recently by a pedicab driver in Austin, Texas—that my writing is Gaimanesque, and I have no idea what that means, or if there’s anything people are waiting for, anything they’d feel cheated if they didn’t get. I hope all the stories are different. ” - Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats
Create an instagram profile with the pictures, snippets from the book and maybe a few "voting" possibilities for the readers to see which parts of the book would be the most enjoyable -or where should the story go? It exists, but nothing is there. You can follow and wait for my lazy me to post something hopefully soon: https://www.instagram.com/parafogs/
Create a spotify playlist (ongoing now) with songs related to the story
That’s all my friends! If you managed to read through the whole post in here you have my endless appreciation. Hope I inspired you, or at least made your fear of going for the challenge disappear.
Have a nice day!
-BB 🐝🐝
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