How Does Your NaNo Grow?

The final two days of NaNoWriMo and some of us have fallen to the wayside, bloodied and muddied, pens and printers empty of ink, bodies convulsing with anathesaurus shock while febrile comrades shout out they’ve completed their goal early.  Bastards.  Me, with two days left, there’s 3260 words needed to meet my goal, which for the non-NaNo savvy, means about 300 words better that the minimum daily requirement. 

This year, rather than a novel, I decided to write a daily short story.  It’s elegant to reduce a theme to a defining moment, not to mention that a writer of long fiction needs to churn out shorter works too.  However, I tend to get caught up in my novels and neglect shorter forms.  I faced NaNoWriMo with trepidation that I couldn’t do this thirty times over.  My fear wasn’t that I couldn’t do it well, but that I couldn’t do it at all.

The oddest thing happened.  Nearly every night this month, I’ve had a vivid dream which, the next day became my Nano contribution.  If you’ve ever kept a dream journal, you’ve probably amazed yourself with the range and clarity of your imagination.  But not every November morning was a vivid dream day for me, so the Butler tossed out a topic and off I went, no problem.  The dream experience seemed to prime the creative activity in my brain, and stories came.

Silk sock yarn.

Great for me, eh?  I dream my Nano into being like some type of New Age psycho.  Well, it’s not that idiosyncratic.  You can structure this process by giving yourself a pre-sleep suggestion.  Or recognise that this is a normal way of writing.  That whole staring into space part of creating.  Going for a walk.  Playing Patience (Solitaire) until an idea or phrase works itself into being.  (Me, I knit weird socks.) 

The essential factor in all of this is to relax.  To let it happen.  To trust that you have inside that noggin of yours the ability to express.  That means stop thinking about blog hits and trending topics and punctuation.  Simply let your voice spill onto the page without censor. 

So how did I do in my Nano?  A story a day, as required, but at some point my brain connected themes from the separate stories.  Then juxtaposed characters and put them into the same world.  Dramatic arcs sprouted.  Yesterday, I caught myself filling in a pre-novel extended synopsis grid. 

As I was knitting a weird sock this month and waiting for a sentence to straighten itself out in my head, I tried to figure out how many stitches made the total sock.  I’m not great at doing mental math, so never got the answer, but I did see a correlation between the type of brain that patiently click click clicks out hundreds of thousands of stitches for something as common as a sock, and the brain that tap tap taps out hundreds of thousands of words to write a novel.  It’s the long haul type of brain.

Hairy nipple sock.

However, that brain can knit what is fondly called in my house, the hairy nipple ankle sock or stay the course and knit an over-the-knee silk stocking.  The essential process is the same.  It’s the design and the desire that makes the final decision.  

NaNo’s taught me that I can write a short story a day.  I'm not sure which direction my Nano 2013 will grow now, but if we knew in advance where we were headed, it wouldn't be fun at all.

It’s Nanowrimo time!

My son, El Punko tried for a few years to convert me to Nano.  To be honest, I thought the idea was madness because of the time frame – 50,000 words in 30 days.  My writing has to percolate to mature, which in itself is a drag, but not all of us are born with genius.  The trouble here was that I confused writing with editing.

A few years ago, Nano came during the semester of my MA when we were doing the novel.  The tutor presented structure like a cake recipe – follow this outline and you have great literature.  Since I don’t cook, I should’ve had better sense, but I thought, okay, take her recipe and do Nano.

There was a wonderful madness about that first year.  A word count goal, a map to get me there, friends who were running the same marathon.  Intrinsic to the madness, however, is discipline.  Like a marathon runner, you cannot stop to pet a dog or watch the buzzards fly over the copse.  You have to run. 

So for a writer, that means you cannot stop and rewrite a phrase to make it brilliant.  You cannot stop to research the correct colour of a room on the other side of the world or look up mythology or even the spelling of a foreign language phrase.  You mainline your creativity into words.  If you have two or three separate ways that a scene can go, you don’t stop to analyse; you write both of them.

Perhaps it’s more like skiing than running.  Although actually, I’ve never skied.  Maybe sled (sledge) riding then, when you push yourself off the edge of a snowy slope and hope for the best during that liberating mad dash, the cold wind gnawing on your cheeks, the sled bumping up and down, maybe getting bogged in new snow or wheeeeeeeee scary speed over a patch of ice.  The freedom (and speed) comes from putting aside all the rules of grammar and good taste to say what you’ve always wanted to say in the way you want to say it even when you know that those sort of words and crap phrases and trite scenarios and shallow characters aren’t going to make it to print.  Hell’s bells, you’re writing and it is this honesty in the first draft that will lead you to something fantastic.

The clean up comes later, maybe with a cup of hot cocoa or an Irish whiskey.  But for now, open your wings, cast off your inhibitions, park your butt and write.

Camp NaNo/NaPo

              Five days in, reporting to you live from Camp NaNo-/NaPo-WriMo!

                                             http://www.campnanowrimo.org

In any group, there has to be one trouble maker.  Alien Magpie, Durham & I wanted to cabin with Fuzzball, and dutifully made our requests to NaNo.  After rejecting various cabins, only the three of us were housed together while Fuzzball was off somewhere in a holding cell.  I suspect it’s because he’s Finnish and we three live in the UK; he didn’t have the proper documentation to cross borders.

But never let it be said that trouble makers aren’t resourceful.  Fuzzball Bones created a secret Facebook clubhouse for us, and The Flying Wombats were born.  Occupation shot up from four to twelve in a matter of hours.  Soon the projects were being announced and as fate would have it, there was a classicist among us to raise the intellectual level.

Durham:  12 short stories, each inspired by one of the Greek pantheon, but it’s realism.  Managed to finish Hephaestus (with a whisper of Oedipus) but can’t type up as fast as I can write.  Bugger. 

The deceptively sweet looking, flute playing Kooky Spice revealed her darker side:

A fantasy story that I’ve been wanting to write for 4.5 years.  There will be assassinations, torture, and deity resurrection involved.  Wheee!

And Magpie took us into an entirely new genre:  

I’m doing a comic on Zev and Troy being super cool assassins.  Fewer words should mean less time, but it doesn’t.  Fewer words take much, much longer. 

I’m the sole early riser, which in this cabin, equates to evil incarnate, but by 10 a.m. on Day One, I’d killed off an innocent bystander while the others hadn’t poured their first cup of coffee.  They call me evil because they envy me.  The murder-a-thon was on.

Magpie:  I haven’t killed anyone yet, but I’m only just up.  Breakfast before murder and all that.

Kooky Spice:  No deaths yet.  But I have the first one planned.

Durham:  I’m biding my time til Hades.

Fuzzball:  You guys and your bloodlust are making me reconsider.  I don’t want to be the odd one out after all...

The cabin bonded during the body count, writers offering surrogate murders for those not ready to commit mortal sins.  Then it began to sink in, the reality of how difficult a challenge any NaNo month really is.

Fuzzball: I’m writing a horror story.  With strippers and drag queens and probably serial killers.  Before it actually began, the idea of NaNo was so exciting and I couldn't wait to get started!  I had my characters, I had a vague plot, I was looking forward to letting the writing just happen and fill in the blanks, and I was sure by the end of it I'd have the best thing I'd ever written in my hands!  Four days into it... My plan feels TOO vague, my characters aren't sure what they want to say and finding the time and the motivation to actually put words on the page is proving so tricky I'm 2k behind on my word count.... BUT! I just figured out my ending and writing down that scene felt so rewarding! NaNo is like a roller coaster, and you just got to love it.

It became obvious that some type of motivation was needed.  A crew of this ilk wouldn’t bat an eye at a threat.  Fortuitously, Camp started on Easter Monday, so chocolate was in bountiful supply.  But then they wanted beer.  And rum.  And mind altering drugs.  There were repercussions.

Durham:  Where is my voice?  Will it come?  Did I drop it somewhere?  I didn’t plan enough.  And NaNo is a hungry fucking child and I don’t have time to feed you!!!!!

But these are the conditions where serious writing happens.  Tips from Neil Gaiman and Josh Whedon were posted.  Word counts were compared.  Offers of feedback were given.  Pet rats were smuggled into camp.  (Three guesses whom those belonged to.)

         http://aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/13/joss-whedons-top-10-writing-tips/

     http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/09/28/neil-gaiman-8-rules-of-writing/

Five days in confirms what I’ve often said, that writers need writers to write.  Writing is about the ability to imagine, to pretend, to play.  While we can do those things inside our own heads, group play energises and supports us.  Kudos to NaNo-NaPo-WriMo and all those groups out there supporting writers.

                                           https://store.lettersandlight.org/donations

Now it’s time for me to get NaNo cracking.  Think of all the murders I’ve not written yet.  A waste, I tell you.  A waste.

                                                   Happy Wombat.