When you’re driving yourself nuts, trying to grind out 1,667 words every day for 30 days, what kind of really dumb commitment could you make? How about keeping a diary – i.e. writing even more words – to document the experience…
For those of you who know what NaNoWriMo is, I suggest you skip to the next paragraph. For those of you who don’t, it’s National Novel Writing Month, in which people attempt to write 50,000 words during November, hopefully leaving them with the first draft of a novel at the end of the month.
Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month.
I have a dirty secret. The novel I published in October – I started writing it about 3 years ago. I wrote draft after draft until I was happy with the end result. This year, I’ve done some minor rewrites, but the book was pretty much finished at the beginning of 2016. So lately, I haven’t really been doing much of the thing that makes you a writer.
Writing.
I started a couple of stories, but lost interest. And the last few months have been taken up with editing, formatting and marketing.
Now, a lot of the people who read PsychoAnalysis enjoyed it. But they kept asking a question:
When’s the next book coming?
The short answer to that was: I have no idea.
And then I started seeing posts about NaNoWriMo and realised that I had to participate. I am a writer. I need to write.
So, here’s what’s happened so far.
Monday – Day minus 1 (or NaNoWriMoEve)
I am seriously psyched up. I have a great idea for a story. I have a psychological profiler and I have a serial killer. Why exactly is he killing people? I don’t know yet. That’s what I’ll find out over the next thirty days (or more likely the next year as I rewrite and rewrite). But I do have some interesting scenes in my head, some themes I want to explore, and a strong urge to write.
Time to prepare. So I take out the Bluetooth keyboard I use with my tablet and… the charger port appears to have been crushed.
I have no f***ing keyboard. How am I going to write 1,667 words tomorrow?
But wait, there’s still some juice in the battery. I order a new keyboard, which will arrive on Wednesday, and pray to the gods of battery life.
Tuesday – Day 1. I’m a writer again
The words flow like water.
My routine involves writing on the 30 minute train journeys to and from work, and grabbing lunch in a café where I can bash away at my keyboard (as long as it stays alive) for up to an hour. I get over 500 words each way on the train and more than 1,000 in my lunch break. For those of you who aren’t numbers people, that’s over 2,000 words.
The beginning comes easily. I don’t have a great opening sentence or anything like that – I can agonise over the minor details sometime next year. But I have a character waking up (yes, I know that’s a lousy start to a story, but this is the first draft) and she interests me. I start to get a sense of who she is, some things from her past, and she’s going to visit a serial killer in prison. I’m interested.
Wednesday – Day 2. Going well until…
Things are still going great, until I leave my tablet in the office, so I can’t write on the way home or on the way to work the next day. No biggie, you say? Just catch up that evening, yeah? Well, bear in mind that I get up early and leave home at 6.25am, returning at 6.15pm. I have two small children, so between 6.15pm and 7.45pm, I spend my time shouting, “Drink your milk”, “Stop hitting your brother”, and “Keep your penis away from your sister.” Then I have to help tidy up, eat and think about paying some bills. But the first rule of NaNoWriMo (well, it’s not so much a rule as the entire point of the whole thing) is that you have to keep writing. So I bang out my last 500 words on my laptop and get an early night.
Thursday – Day 3. Slump
No matter how many times you repeat the Hemingway quote “All first drafts are shit”, at some point you will start to feel discouraged. Today I notice that I have been writing almost nothing but dialogue, and my characters keep having conversations in which they talk about things that happened in a previous scene. They are telling me stuff I already know. Not particularly thrilling. It’s a bit like those ‘reality’ TV shows where beautiful people who are supposedly friends sleep with each other’s partners and then talk about it endlessly. And there are no beautiful people or big houses to look at in my book. But I encourage myself to just keep wading through this lake of raw, untreated sewage, because there could be something fantastic floating in it (protected by a watertight container, obviously).
Friday – Day 4. Gold
It happens. A couple of days ago I wrote a conversation between two characters, which felt a little out of place. But today, I realise that the relationship between those two characters holds the key to the whole story, explaining why the killer is killing people yet has no memory of doing it. I won’t tell you what that reason is, because I hope the many thousands of people (ahem) reading this will go on to buy the book. All that matters is that I’ve done what every ‘pantser’ (someone who writes by the seat of their pants rather than being one of those tedious folk who plan and outline) dreams of – I was meandering along and then BAM!, I had a great twist for my story.
Saturday – Day 5. It’s the weekend!
So far, it’s been easy to carve out some time in the day to write. But weekends mean time at home with the family. No train journeys, no lunch breaks. Lunch with the kids is an hour, but that time is spent cooking something that a pair of fussy eaters will eat and then chasing a 16 month old girl around the room, trying to feed a moving target because she refuses to sit down at the table for more than 2 minutes. It’s a little like hunting an amphetamine-fueled Care Bear, but instead of a gun you have a spoonful of yoghurt, or a chicken nugget. Thankfully, though, these creatures get tired. And that means they have to take a nap. Now, usually nap times are where I recover from the morning’s exertions. But this is NaNoWriMo, so I have to write as many words as I can while praying that the little buggers angels stay asleep.
Sunday – Day 6. Happy birthday to you
My son’s fourth birthday is tomorrow. So we’re having the party today. It’s also my birthday tomorrow, but when you share your special day with a child, there is only one person who is going to get the attention. And because he’s having a party, he’s skipping his nap. Someone also needs to entertain him while the party is being set up… that would be me. Then there’s the actual party, followed by cleaning up. So when do I write? I suppose, because I’m ahead on my word count (I knew weekends were going to be tough), and today has been, let’s say, a teeny bit tiring, I could take a break. But no, if I skip one day, there’s a danger the spell will be broken. So I sit down at around 8.30pm and write until I go to bed.
Monday – Day 7. Uh-oh
So far, I’ve been targeting 2,000+ words every weekday, because I have less time to write at the weekends. But I realise there’s another problem. On Mondays I play football (or ‘soccer’ as my American readers would call it) at lunchtime. I obviously can’t write and play ‘soccer’ at the same time, so I’m going to lose fifty percent of my writing time every Monday….AARGH! More of those evenings where I write before bedtime. Unless…
I write for an extra twenty minutes before catching the train in the morning and then I somehow manage to pound out over eight hundred words on the journey home by typing without interruption. Word count achieved. Just.
And when I get home, I discover that my wife is taking me out for a surprise birthday dinner while her parents babysit. The cocktail menu at the restaurant includes a Hemingway Martini, so I obviously order one of those. I don’t actually like it, but who cares, I’m not writing and I don’t have to shovel food into my mouth while my children scream at me. Happy birthday.
First week target: 11,667. Words written: about 13,000 (yeah, yeah, I know I should have the exact number, but I don’t, ok?)
Next week: The difficult week two (or ‘week poo’ as I call it), the curse of the pantsers, and some stuff that hasn’t happened yet so I can’t tell you about it.
If you like serial killer thrillers, you might enjoy my novel PsychoAnalysis.