RSSHow to Write a Novel in 30 Days
Nov 30
A Writer's Blog Writing Comments Off
Like most writers raised on television with an attention span that lasts no more than thirty minutes, and that is with commercials, I had a novel somewhere deep inside me. My first attempt at writing a novel was actually writing a screenplay. Think about it. It is almost all dialogue. Your characters are two dimensional. And anything that you cannot accomplish with stunt doubles and camera angles can be grafted in with special effects.
I finished the screenplay and invited all my friends to come by and do a reading with me. Two of them showed up and I got generous compliments on my accomplishment.
The novel still stayed deep inside me, like the feeling you get eating too many carbs and having them combine in your stomach into a brick. Dissatisfied with my screenplay, I took a crack at the great American novel I had hidden away in my belly. It took several months and the result was a lot like tiramisu; tempting and sugary but insubstantial and kind of watery.
Needless to say, I was embarrassed to share the dreck with my family, much less foist such garbage on anyone else. Other partial novels came and went, stories unfinished, characters unrealized and climaxes undiscovered. Before the thirtieth of November 2006, I had never in my entire writer’s life finished a piece of full-length fiction.
So what made me decide to write a novel now? Was it time? Was it luck? Was it inspiration? It was, in fact, none of those things. It was random. I noticed a link for National Novel Writing Month, which just happened to be November. The goal was 50,000 words in thirty days or less. No excessive obsessive rewriting, just write, each day, every day as much time as there was to write.
I set my personal goal at 2,000 words a day, which for the record takes no less than two hours a day, depending on how focused I am. My goal gave me some leeway because I knew the Thanksgiving holiday was going to play the spoiler if I was too far behind by the last week. And what do you know? The first week’s worth of my novel was actually pretty good, and the process of putting the words on paper went smoothly.
Then things started to get tricky. For one, it took a lot of discipline to write that much and that often, especially because I did not have a lot of time to consider what I was writing. But I also had to write three news briefs a day, four full-length feature articles a week, and there was that thing called full-time employment which keeps me enraptured from 8am to 5pm twenty days out of the month. To balance all these responsibilities, it helped that I had no social life. But by far the thing that was the biggest obstacle was my own damn thirty-minute attention span. I played a lot of FreeCell in my moments of weakness.
But the whole structure of NaNoWriMo played to my advantage. Here I was, instructed to write obsessively, ignore quality, abandon the editing process, and just produce. Lacking any editorial constraints was actually very freeing. And after the first week, I can say quite unequivocally that some of it was dreck.
On the other side of it, though, even without having a plan, I managed to produce a story from start to finish. The last week or so was me writing a lot of exposition that will either be inserted into key points of the story or discarded completely. It was where I defined my central themes and revealed a little bit more about my characters now that I had watched them develop.
As I wrote, I made notes on plot points and descriptions that were skimpy. The further along in the month I got, the more notes I made because I started racing through every sequence of events just to get to the next moment in the novel. I was fighting the November 30th deadline and my own exhaustion. Great American novel, it was not. But a solid foundation for something great? Yeah, maybe so.
I highly recommend this writing process for any amateur writer. Just take a month out of your life and squeeze in 50,000 words that you only suspected were there. If you need some structure and support, wait until next November and sign up at nanowrimo.org. When you are done, you get a little web icon and the sense of accomplishment that comes with finally getting the first draft of that novel down on paper that you have been chewing on for so long.
Here is my proudly displayed little web icon:
