I squeaked in just under the wire this year, I’m not ashamed to admit. This year’s NaNoWriMo was a tough one. As I previously mentioned, I started the month more burned out than I realized, with barely the energy to come up with an idea in the first place. Then I fell behind after the first couple of days, and spent the rest of the month struggling to keep from falling even farther back. The job tossed me a couple of curveballs too (though not as bad as the ones they’d already tossed me in September and October), and I’ll admit I considered quitting a couple of times. Not too seriously, because nothing happened that really justified quitting, but it was an option I considered.
When you’re racing to finish a novel in a month, you will grasp at the thinnest of straws more than once. For me, the first set of straws was all about the plot. I didn’t have one, but I had some ideas. I started with a guy who gets fired from his job while the job keeps a dead guy on the books. I thought the dead guy might end up being more important to the story than he ended up being. He gets mentioned a lot, but, not surprisingly I guess, he doesn’t do much to advance the story.
For a little while I thought maybe the story would be about the fired guy and a friend of his giving up on the whole work thing and starting their own religion. That possibility gets mentioned several times, but becomes more something they plan to do after they finish doing whatever the hell the book is supposed to be about than something the book could actually be about. So that was no help. To get the whole religion thing started, I needed a character to suggest it, and for that I thought it would be easier to drag in a character I’ve used in a couple of other stories, since he’s been published before and has proven to be the type of character who would naturally be planning a religion as his next career move.
Since this character, Yank, besides being used in a couple of stories, is also one of the main characters of my previous(?) comic strip Greetings from Shokanaw, I thought he’d be a good source of comic relief. And maybe he was at first, but eventually he started turning from comic relief to the damn conscience of the story. I was too tired to stop him. As I followed the characters deeper into their plan to fight back against the inconveniences of unemployment, Yank became less punchline machine and more man with a point to make. I knew for sure I’d lost all control over him when this happened:
“You say you’re concerned about the people who work for you, but the first lie every employer tells himself is how much he cares about his employees,” Yank said. “It’s a lie they have to tell, and that they have to believe. They couldn’t get any real work done otherwise. Tell the lie, then believe the lie, and then you can go about your business. It’s how the world works. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
It was an important point to make in the story, and by that point Yank was the only one who could’ve made it, but comic relief? Hardly.
This book only got written because I got my upgraded copy of QuickOffice for the iPhone. No doubt my fellow commuters thought I was texting away like a 16-year-old girl every morning and every night. That actually would make more sense than what I was really doing. Who in their right mind writes a book on a cell phone during a crowded commute? Nobody in their right mind, I’ll tell you that. The bulk of the rest of it was written using Pages on the iPad. A small amount was written in Word on my MacBook, but rarely was I in the mood to sit in my office and type. Last year that’s where almost all the work got done. This year I’m so out of the habit of working in my home office, it was the last place I wanted to be after a long day at work.
And those long days at work, they were long. There probably weren’t as many of them as there were last year, but when they happened, they were like a punch in the face. There’s a reason for that, and I’m not going to explain it here today, but eventually I will. But basically, any time I got stuck with a long work day, besides having to do the work, I had to deal with the fact that it shouldn’t have been me stuck working late. That shouldn’t be my responsibility anymore. But it was, and it kept me from home a lot, so those long commutes became the place to write.
I think I would recommend the commute-writing for anyone who just wants to get into the rhythm of writing without having to think about it too much. Because if you try to think about it too much, I doubt you can get much done on a bus or a subway. When you’re sitting at home, at your desk, computer at the ready, you can afford to sit back and contemplate that next perfect word you’re about to release unto the world. When you’re jammed into a seat on the bus, half the time you’re typing to spite the situation you find yourself in. You’ll be damned if you’re gonna let your stupid commute to your stupid job keep you from getting something done. You’re a writer so goddammit, you’re gonna write. That’s how I did it. I’d sit down in the bus and within a minute I’d be banging out the next scene. Was it great stuff? No. But when you’re racing to 50K, nothing you write is great. The bus stuff was as good as the couch stuff. For what that’s worth.
For awhile I thought my main character was going to cheat on his girlfriend. Possibly with one of his coworkers. Maybe even with one of his girlfriend’s friends who was hanging around the story looking for trouble. No cheating ever happened. Stupid character had more integrity than I wanted him to. That happens sometimes. Possibly because the original plan for the book had him getting very little support from his girlfriend over his sudden unemployment, and ultimately that’s not how that part of the story worked out either. What’s the point in even trying to plan these things, even if the planning only happens a day or two before the writing, if nothing ever goes according to plan? WIsh I could answer that one for you.
So in the end I’m left with 51-or-so thousand words, and a story that turned out almost nothing like I planned. Par for the course, probably, if you’ve ever heard me discuss any of the other NoNoWriMo books I’ve written. As usual, I had some periods where I didn’t know what day it was, didn’t know when I was getting any sleep, didn’t know why the hell it was 2AM and I was still writing, didn’t know why I was bothering, and didn’t know if I was ever going to finish. Was it worth it? Not sure. But a couple of things happened at the end of the month to make me think maybe it was.
First off, the last couple of days of writing went better than they should have after the month leading up to them. It’s like some raw, creative part of the brain finally shoved everything else aside and took over. Every scene that needed to be written to get to the end jumped out at exactly the right moment. It’s as if I finally found the proper amount of exhaustion, frustration and anger to fuel the last 10,000 words. And then there was the other creative project I had going on in November, though “going on” is way too charitable a way to refer to it.
You see, there was a December 1 deadline for a short story collection that I wanted to be in. The short stories had to be about people who worked in the courts, I had a big story about the courts, and figured all I had to do was edit out a piece of that story. I even knew what I wanted to use, and several months ago had pulled out 3 scenes that I thought I could edit together to submit. Then somehow I managed to blow several months’ worth of lead time and, if this submission was going to happen, would have to do this editing, and any rewriting, while working on the NaNoWriMo story. Somehow it took until well into November before I realized this was a bad idea. Then I read the submission guidelines again and convinced myself that the stuff I’d planned to use wouldn’t fit anyway, and gave up that idea.
Cut to November 29, when I remembered another part of the same story that might work. I ignored this revelation, because I was busy finishing the NaNoWriMo book. But the idea wouldn’t leave, and when I finished writing on the 30th, I was in such a creative frenzy I decided I’d see how much work it would take to Frankenstein something together out of this new idea. So I went back to this old courtroom story (coincidentally, my 2005 NaNoWriMo book), hacked out 3 pieces, put them together with just a little bit of new writing, and mailed that sucker out. This whole process took maybe an hour.
Do I think this story will get bought? Probably not. But I needed to feel like I was in the game somewhere, and this was my best chance. It was odd taking 5-year-old writing and stitching it together with new writing, because I think I’ve learned a couple of things in the last 5 years. I hope I have, anyway. But the insane creative part of my brain wanted to keep working, so I let it, and assuming the story gets rejected, I’ll post it to the Treetop Lounge eventually.
This last-minute frenzy taught me something, though. It taught me that if I take the time to work on something, crazy things happen that I wasn’t expecting. It also taught me that the stunts, like writing 50K words in a month, are fun but not enough. I need more. I need to be working on stuff that might lead somewhere. That might turn into something important. I know I can’t abandon the stunts completely, because that’s not in my nature, but I have to put in more time when there’s no stunt going on, because if I put in the time, I’ll get something good.
Previously, I’ve done this November mad rush and then sat back for weeks to rest from the abuse my brain took during the stunt. This time I’m trying something different. There’s a writing project with a February 1 deadline that I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Have tried, in fact, and failed. It’s time to take another crack at it, so this week my brain is gonna have to start being creative again because there’s another story that needs writing, and time is short. Unlike this blog post. Is it possible to write 50K words about a 50K-word story? If so, I may have just done it tonight. Damn.
T “if I’d stuck to Twitter this post wouldn’t have gotten so long” green
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