I wrote a piece last night of my first NaNoWriMo experience and the non-writing challenge I faced that year -- the year I learned I had cancer.
Take a look below at what I sent Writer's Digest.
Keep writing and thanks for reading.
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I have accepted the
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge five times, starting in
November 2009, and have completed the challenge three of those times.
The novel I wrote in 2009, An Untidy Affair, and the one I
wrote in 2010, The Last Tontine Survivor, both made it to the
quarterfinal round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA)
competition. I entered Affair in ABNA in 2011, while Tontine
was a quarterfinalist this year. I also wrote a novel during NaNoWriMo last
November and plan to enter that work, The Deadly Game, in ABNA in 2015.
I love NaNoWriMo because
it truly gives you, the author, the right to write, to sweep away all the
external and internal stumbling blocks and to focus on the task at hand --
50,000 words in 30 days, or an average of 1,667 a day.
I am a freelance
journalist by occupation and write all the time. But fiction is different and
was, back in 2009, much harder for me. Unlike a news or feature article,
a novel is like having a long, elaborate daydream which is written down.
It's how I approach it.
That first year, I
wasn't sure I could do it. But I decided to try and settled on a
story idea in the spring of 2009. It was to be an auto racing novel,
with the protagonist facing major challenges both on and off the track. I
love auto racing -- open-wheel cars in particular -- and know a lot about the
sport. But the story would still require a lot of research on the
technical side, which I planned to do in the summer and fall.
In early July 2009, I
learned that I might have cancer, which was confirmed just after Labor Day
that year. And suddenly, I couldn't write fiction. Faced with the challenge of
my life in the real world, I couldn't daydream the dreams necessary to write
fiction. I was stuck in the real world. I was focused on learning
everything I could about my cancer so I could make a reasoned decision of the
course of action for treatment. For seven weeks, I sought advice from six
different doctors, including leaders in the field. But it wasn't until late
October that I made a decision I was comfortable with.
Problem was, it was much
too late for me to do the research I needed for the novel. So I decided on a
murder mystery because it is a genre I enjoy reading and am comfortable with. I
decided on a setting and a theme I was familiar with so that there wouldn't be
much research needed, and I could do it while I was writing in November.
I hate outlining for a
variety of reasons but knew I couldn't write 1,667 a day, everyday, without
knowing where I was going in advance. Therefore, I hand wrote a nine-page
outline in narrative form and also completed a spreadsheet to track my
daily progress.
Shortly after midnight
on Nov. 1, I started, and after 90 minutes had 1,100 words. I was
surprised that the first sentence in my outline turned into nearly 900 words of
text in the novel. I wrote later that day after church and completed 3,200 words
that first day. On the second day I completed 2,940 words and 3,500 the third
day. I was writing twice the rate I needed. With the encouragement of NaNo
writers in the Indianapolis area and others I met online, I continued at
that pace and reached 50,000 words on Nov. 15, and completed the first
draft four days later, for a total of 54,000 words. (With revisions and
re-writes, Affair is complete at 74,000
words.)
In 2010, I outlined
again, and challenged myself to write twice as many words a day as needed. Tontine is a suspense/thriller and I
finished the first draft on Nov. 18 (instead of Nov. 15) only because
I attended an out-of-town meeting that November and lost three days of
writing. (The final version is 76,000 words.)
Last year, I reached
50,000 words again on Nov. 18 because what I learned from failures in 2011
and 2012 was that I need a decent outline and need to jump well ahead of
the daily word count. Get a lot done quickly in case of troubles later. It's
hard for me to catch up on the word count, so I never get behind. But that's
just me.
I'm already working
on research for NaNoWriMo this November. Finally, I plan to write that
auto-racing story.
My advice is prepare as
much as possible ahead of time, set difficult but achievable goals, find
writing partners and stay in touch with them, write something everyday and,
most importantly, HAVE FUN writing.
Whatever you write is going to be crappy but you can start fixing it on Dec. 1.
You can't fix it if you don't first write it.
If you write and have
fun, you will find your word count going up quicker than the approach of
the Nov. 30 deadline. So HAVE FUN.
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