NaNoWriMo postmortem

So here we are. NaNoWriMo is over, and I didn’t hit my 50k goal, much less finish the book.

What happened?

I started off exceedingly well. In just a few days, I was up to 15,000 words, and then 30,000 by about a week in. That’s a huge amount of production, and reading back over even now, I like most of it. I had spent so much time in October carefully plotting and planning that for the majority of the book I knew, going in, exactly what needed to happen in each chapter. As I moved forward, details clarified themselves yet further. By the time I was 10 days into the month, I was gold.

Unfortunately, real life happened.

First I had to give a lecture on something I know very little about, which meant dropping everything for a few days to swot it up and compose a lecture. I knew that would happen, and had budgeted for it, so no real problem there, but I did lose momentum, which hurts more than you might imagine.

Then I started to panic about Thanksgiving. My mother decided she’d do everything this year, despite the fact that she’s declining pretty significantly in mind and body, and I kept expecting her to ask for help… which she never did.

And then there’s the fact that much of my actual income comes from test prep for high school students, and the first big round of tests are at the start of December, so all my students went into panic mode. I spent a week or more just trying to reschedule everybody to work around them going away or otherwise dealing with family craziness over the holiday, and talking them off their personal metaphorical ledges, and I just had no mental energy left. I did a little writing, pushing up to 35,000 words, but not much.

Along came Thanksgiving itself. Mom did about half the necessary work and just kind of walked off, leaving me to grab an apron and pull together the entire meal in less than an hour. I made it—just—but by the time we got home I was literally shaking with stress and exhaustion, and it took days to calm down properly.

And then… a few more days of test prep tutoring, and we hit the end of the month.

Honestly, looking back over the last few years, I can’t think of a worse month to try to write a whole novel than November. I don’t know about everybody else, but for my family November means Thanksgiving, and gearing up for exams and such in December, and prepping for the big holiday season in late December. It means having less time than usual. It means there are big shows at the high school on which my son will be running various kinds of tech, and my daughter will be prepping for big recitals.

So is that just excuses and sour grapes? Partly, yes.

I will get this book done this coming month. There are two intricate snarls to untangle, but otherwise it’s fairly clean and straightforward. But November—the hell with that.

What I learned from this experience (apart from that I hate November) is that planning thoroughly in advance is definitely better for me than “pantsing” (i.e., flying straight through by the seat of my pants). 

When I wrote The Rules, the first Ghildor book, I pantsed it. It worked fine, though it wasn’t especially quick. And looking back, it took quite a while before I had any sense what the book was really about. I knew roughly what the plot was from the start, but that’s not the same as what a book is about. That book is really about betrayal and pride. It’s about how some very rich people think they can do pretty much anything, and rules or ethics or whatever don’t apply to them—and how that kind of outlook fares when it brushes up against someone who genuinely has no respect for normal rules of any kind. (In the terms formulated by Aaron James in his wonderful book Assholes: A Theory, it’s about the difference between an asshole and a sociopath.) But I didn’t know this until I was a good third of the way in, maybe more.

With The Scryer (a title that needs to change, because I don’t think all that many people know the word), I’ve known what it was about from the outset. I’ve understood right from very early days how the plot and the principal characters and the general notion of the book all weave together, so that in the end there’s a murder mystery about which the most basic question—whodunnit?—is pointless and irrelevant, even absurd; in a sense, it’s my nod to Akutagawa’s “In the Grove,” the principal source for Kurosawa’s film Rashomon. And because I have known this all along, when it actually came to writing the thing, I could deal with problems very directly and immediately.

For example, I realized at a certain point that Part 3 didn’t have nearly enough action. It was getting slow and dull. I could just shove in action—easy enough, really—but I wanted to make it integral to the book, not incidental. So the question became how the fundamental issues of the book could lead naturally to some strong action. For balance and pace, I wanted that to happen at points X and Y. So I spent a day thinking about this while doing other things, and realized that at point X I could reinforce one of the background pressures setting up the whole tension of the book, and at point Y I could tie off a hanging thread and also ramp up the sense of what Ghildor is really all about, clearing the way for the Part 4 crux of the novel. Then I sketched them out in my head, just roughly what ought to take place, and wrote them both in a couple of hours. When I wrote The Rules, I couldn’t do this, because I didn’t know why the various bits and pieces needed to be there, only that here I needed action or here I needed to clarify a character point or whatever.

I should finish this book by the end of December—and I don’t mean a coarse rough draft. What I’ve got, about 40k words, is pretty well polished already; the remaining 20k-odd should be done in a week or so and then I can polish for the rest of the month. By the end of December I should have a very clean, tight draft, ready to send around to my “beta-readers.”

And then I can get started planning the next one!

Thanks for reading, as always.