Well November is over, and as the moustaches fall and clean
shaven faces are once more looked upon gratefully by family members and
co-workers who put up with thirty days of dirty looking, unfashionably
manscaped faces; I too have come to the end of a little journey of my own.
NaNoWriMo is over, and I have my novel. Though it isn’t
finished exactly, I have shot past the required fifty thousand words and am happy
to call myself a ‘winner’.
My novel, Fourth Rock, is something which I am pretty proud
of. Having never really written anything beyond the required English pieces
back in 2002, it was great to just get out there and let my imagination run
riot. I have often toyed with the idea of writing in a more professional sense,
but as I haven’t really had any proper exposure to it, it has forever remained
a bit of a pipedream of mine.
NaNoWriMo however turned out to be just what I needed; in
more ways than one.
It gave me motivation to actually get out there, start writing,
and actually stick with it for once. Too often I have written a few thousand
words of a tentative story, before I gave up at the hopelessness of it all, and
abandoned the beginning moments of plots, burgeoning characters and promising dialogue.
NaNoWriMo gave me a set time to do something; I had thirty days, and I had to
write something. It was self imposed homework.
But along with the motivation of a concrete deadline, it
also gave me a pretty good excuse. If my novel was crap, well what else were
you to expect? After all I was seeking to write a novel in thirty days. Sure Agatha
Christie may have been able to churn out bets selling novels in a month, but
hey; I’m no writer, so cut me some slack. NaNoWriMo takes away some of the
pressure by forcing you to just do it. You don’t have to spend ages crafting
your masterpiece, and feel devastated when people critique it. Consequentially
I can be happy with the fact that my novel is basically a cool story, with a
hopefully interesting plot. There is no real character development, but what
the hell; I can save that for a novel that I don’t have to write in thirty days,
and that I can actually plan out in advance.
Apart from motivation (and an excuse for crapness),
NaNoWriMo also gave me some sorely needed practise. The deadline was not only
good at inspiring me, but it also makes you face up to things that generally
you might want to leave aside for a while. I enjoy writing plot, and thinking
of storylines, and character backgrounds; but I have never really stuck with
anything long enough to have to worry about things like dialogue, or actually
describing characters doing things.
It took me a few days to get used to the fact that as I was
writing my story, I had to not only describe how conversations worked, but also
what the characters were doing while this happened, and how to present this in
a way that wasn’t terminally boring.
“Hello” John said
“Hello to you too”
Ryleah said.
“How about this
weather” Said John
“Yes, how about it”
replied Ryleah.
It is a bit wooden if you don’t learn how to actually make
it sound like the books you read. My problem in the beginning was to simply try
and write dialogue as I would imagine a conversations transcript to be. No
indications of who was saying it, or even in what context or tone they were
saying it in. Is it a reply, was it a shout, or did they enquire? Were they
saying this to anyone in particular, or in any direction? I had to think about
all of this, and what’s more I had to do it over, and over again.
This repetitiveness is also useful in that you begin to
notice your faults more so than you usually would when writing, as you are
doing it in such a short time span. It was when I looked at a couple of
paragraphs and noted that most of my sentences began with the same thing (‘He
did this....,’ He did that...’), that I realised I needed to make sure that I
wasn’t just describing things sentence after sentence, but rather that I was
telling a story, which is more than just quotes and descriptions.
Basically I only really had experience writing broad
strokes; now I had to paint in the details.
As you might also expect, NaNoWriMo sucks up a lot of your
time; so much so that I neglected my blog for pretty much the whole of November.
I remember when I was ten days into November, I tried to write a blog post
about my experience thus far. I ended up abandoning the post upon realising
that I had a cool idea of a way my main character could escape his latest
predicament. So after I ditched my blog for a while, and spent the rest of the
night details my detectives escape from an assassin in a dust storm, I decided
it was best to just put aside blogging for the month, and keep all my writing
focused in one area: my novel.
I did however write this much for the blog:
“It is getting to the point where
I am really committed now. Characters are set, and plans are in motion that I
don’t really have time to alter anymore. There were some things I wanted to
include that I know I can’t really fit in now. Goodbye biologist love interest,
and so long Martian prostitutes (I am glad to do away with these, so that I no
longer have to have a couple of my mates insisting on the inclusion of a three
breasted woman, ala Total Recall).”
[Note: Though looking back at this now I am somewhat happy
to note that the biologist love interest did make it in to the novel, though I
accidently ended up killing her off prematurely, so now she is just a
flashback.]
Another great thing about NaNoWriMo is that it makes you
feel ridiculously cool. When people ask you what you’ve been up to you can
reply nonchalantly “Oh, this month I’m just writing a novel.”
One day I even applied for leave form work and spent half
the day in Irish Murphy’s drinking pints of Guinness and typing away on my
iPad. It felt great to be devoting my time to writing a novel, especially when
my time was during work hours, and I was accruing leave loading. Though by the
end of the sixth pint my writing was getting a bit sloppy.
It was interesting seeing how my story grew during NaNoWriMo.
Much differently than it would have had I not been worried about the deadline
looming at the end of the month that’s for sure.
I was reluctant to write some of the scenes I knew had to
take place in my novel; the complex fight scenes, the scenes where my characters
drew their motivation, or the introduction scenes for my main character. So I
ended up not only delaying myself, but also the characters themselves, who
would suddenly have so much to do, whereas beforehand they were sitting idly
by.
Around a third of the way through I began to worry. I had
decided all these cools things I wanted to happen, and yet I had left most of
them unwritten. Instead I moved on with the happenings that caused them, and
the consequences of them.
This is in part because I didn’t think I had the ability to
write them, and also because I didn’t quite know enough details yet to make it
work. I had scenes of my ‘hero’ getting recruited, but no actual cause or
motivation given to him. I had him on the ‘case’, but never defined what the case
was.
Another thing I had been shying away from was describing the
characters looks. I am notoriously bad at describing people, or even noticing
that people’s looks appearances have changed. I blame in part my mum, and my
sisters; the latter of which are hairdressers (and thus change their hair
styles more than I do my underwear), and the former is often their client. So
after years of variable hairstyles I am now immune to noticing change.
Consequentially, I am the last person you would want to identify a criminal
(but possibly the first person you would want to commit a crime near).
I initially dealt with this the same way I was dealing with
many things I was referencing, but hadn’t yet fleshed out; by the inclusion of
gibberish. Check out the first sighting of my main character for instance:
“From behind the truck a
#$#$##$##$# man strode into view. He was 34234234234234”
I didn’t have a description, I didn’t have a name. But I
could tell you that he had a truck, brewed scotch on Mars, would have his ring
and little fingers shot off, and any other number of irrelevant points of
interest.
Indeed it wasn’t until the last five days that he finally
got a last name at all. I had gone with John as his first name, because it is a
very common sounding name, and that’s what I wanted (sorry Johns). You’re every
day Martian dude. Yet I couldn’t find a last name that actually stuck with me.
In the end it was my wife who provided the answer to the problem when she
suggested the surname Murphy. It struck me as having that ‘feeling’ that I was
searching for for my main character, don’t ask me why.
My main character now had a full name; John Murphy.
I ended up naming pretty much all my human characters after
people I knew. The young policy advisor for the Martian Secretary was Leigh
Gibbs, a portmanteau of two of my mates’ names. The Secretary was Carol
Weybury, again a blend of two people who happen to sit near me at work. The
assassin is Ryleah, my niece. The gadget man is Jesse, my nephew. I wanted a
Chinese name so I picked Molly, the guide my parents use when they are in China
(Molly is her name, and she is Chinese, therefore it is a Chinese name, ok?). I
used the name Ha for the flashback biologist love interest, as that was the
name of my lecturer in mathematics, and I didn’t want to populate my future
vision of Mars with any anglocentric bias.
I was never under the impression that I would be writing in
a linear, start to finish pattern when I started NaNoWriMo. Instead I had some
interesting ideas that I wrote out, and was trying to tie together into one
long narrative. What’s more I was surprised to find that after a few days it
was actually working! Things were tying together. Formerly unrelated ideas
suddenly made more sense if I connected them.
I often found myself running back in the story, and placing
some foreshadowing to a future event, or perhaps a less obvious or explicit
placement of a ‘
Chekov’s gun’ style implement, which would serve its purpose
later on. Or I would have my character in a bind, and then remember that I had
handily placed an Impact Hammer in my story earlier, though that wasn’t even a
real life tool (at least the kind I used).
It is a great feeling to all of a sudden realise that you
can do something really cool in your story, especially when it is utilising
some mundane element you had written in earlier. If you give your characters
tools in their story, and furbish them with enough smarts, they are often able
of finding their way out of situations you have created for them without any
real solution in mind.
In the beginning I had grand plans for my novel, very grand
plans. However as the writing went on, and I practised describing things,
authoring conversations, and narrating inner monologues; I soon began to notice
the word count expanding, while my opportunities for new characters, setting
and chapters diminishing. I would spend pages describing a computer, or a
rover, and forget that I had whole character to introduce, and plot points to uncover.
Not to mention the whole story resolution thing I hear you are meant to put at
the end of a novel.
Some of the people I had imagined as main characters were
now no longer even in the story, whereas others who had been introduced merely
to make way for a plot point or another characters introduction, were now so well
introduced that they suddenly had their own back story!
As I mentioned earlier, there are no real character arcs in
my story. They may find themselves thrown around the solar system, losing
fingers, fighting for their lives, losing their freedoms, or making friends;
but the characters themselves don’t really grow. Characters arc in a way that
you want them to; this story was written on the fly. Sometimes I didn’t even
know how a character was going to get out of their bind until I had written up
to that point.
So now I find myself now, sitting at home with my sixty-five
thousand plus novel at approximately 80% completion, with a bit less
motivation, and somewhat more fatigue on the writer’s front. This is why it has
taken me a while to get back into blogging.
I need to churn out the last few chapters and fillers as
quick as I can, and edit it as roughly as I can. It may be tempting now that
the deadline is gone (and I am a winner!) to give into my slovenly nature, and
slowly pull the pieces together, however I can see one big problem with this: I
lose my best excuse!
I can no longer proudly point out my own attempt at novel
writing, and then cover my bases with critics by standing behind the excise of
having written it in 30 days. If I spend too long editing and writing, then I
will have put in too much effort for it to suck legitimately. Then it would
just plain suck
So the way I look at it is a bit of a technicality. Yes the
NaNoWriMo rules let you win whilst only having written the first fifty thousand
words of your novel. It is after all a motivational tool at its heart.
However if I look back at my NaNoWriMo log I note that I had
roughly seven days of no writing at all. These were generally weekends. So I am
using these surplus days as my ‘fill the gaps’ days, so that I can spread them
out over the next week, and finish off my first attempt at a novel.
In closing, I must say I would definitely recommend
NaNoWriMo for anyone who likes the idea of writing a story, or even those who
don’t. It’s a great way to start up your writing bug, and also learn a little
bit about yourself in the process. It’s also a fantastic way of reminding
yourself of your own potential.
It’s like
Angus Kidman from Lifehacker pointed out after taking
part in NaNoWriMo for the second time; if I have managed to write a gods damned
novel in one month, then what’s my excuse for being so unproductive in the
other 11 months?
So with that over, and with my semi-triumphant return to
blogging, I bid you adieu, and look forward to being able to apply myself back
to this blog, and hopefully with a slightly improved writing ability.
[Note: This blog post in itself is over 2,700 words, so if
anything I have at least learnt to enhance my quantity of writing, if not my
quality.]
