Divisions and Precisions

NaNoWriMo Retrospective

All of the phones are down at work for who knows how long. All of the internet connections are down too. So what am I doing? Writing a journal entry, of course! There are so many things I could write about, but I think the biggest thing that's happened to be lately has to be NaNoWriMo.

When I first heard about it, I thought, 'Wow, what a great idea. I wish I could do that.' The idea, for anyone who hasn't been paying attention, was to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. The idea behind this is that novel writing is a "one day" job -- as in, "one day I'll write a novel". That was me, all over. I've had a novel idea for over a year now, but I was never able to sit down and really work it. Heck, I have tons of short stories I haven't been able to finish. Yet when I've had a deadline, like for Tribe 8, I've been able to finish things, and finish them quickly. So I thought NaNoWriMo was a cool idea, but I didn't sign up.

Then Julie mentioned in her writing journal that she'd signed up and that she wanted a writing buddy. Well, Julie lives near me and we've emailed back and forth, so I thought 'what the hell'. So I signed up. I was absolutely terrified. I was certain I'd never be able to finish the 50,000 words, and that NaNoWriMo would be just another item on my list of unfinished writing projects.

I got sucked into the NaNo internet subculture. I found myself signing up for every email list and club I could find that was even remotely related to NaNoWriMo. Then I got email from none other than Chris Baty himself (NaNoWriMo founder and looney-in-chief) telling me that I'd been randomly selected to be one of the month's "Wrimo of the Day". That was it. I was in this for the long haul. I admit, from then on, it was all downhill. I was obsessed.

Halloween night, October 31st, I stayed up until midnight so I could write my first couple paragraphs. I ended up writing over 1,000 words in an hour. It was a drug. I don't know how else to describe it. The feeling of heedlessly, giddily writing at a furious pace made me high. So The Host was born.

The first week was a breeze. I wrote like the wind, uncaring of how good or how bad my story was, or of how much sleep I was missing every night. Characters appeared out of nowhere and started taking over the story. One character, Sara, originally mentioned in passing as part of another character's backstory, showed up and ended up nearly stealing the show from everyone else. The second week I started to lag a little. I never really questioned my story -- there wasn't time for that -- but I did get tired, and I did start getting behind on my writing. I became the queen of procrastination. While Sara and A.J. and all their cohorts languished, I designed an elaborate spreadsheet to calculate how many words I had written per writing session, per day, and total. Then I compared my totals to my goals, and calculated how far off I was (or how far ahead I was) from those goals. This spreadsheet was a masterful work of procrastination. I even, later in the month, added a line that calculated the average number of words I'd written per day.

But, back to the writing. School suffered. Work suffered. My friends, god how they suffered. Everything that came out of my mouth was all "novel, novel, novel!" This was not a healthy relationship. I didn't care, though, because I was still high from the words that came out of my fingers. I have never, ever had a writing experience like this. Normally I stop, I pause, I agonize over what words I'm writing. I deliberate extensively over what my characters should do next, whether it's about going off to kill a villain or just sitting down to drink a cup of coffee. With The Host, I could not do that. I couldn't. I just had to hang on and keep writing. Eventually, the characters told me what should happen next. They started doing things and making decisions on their own. They created the story seemingly without me.

I've heard writers talk about this phenomenon, and I've heard non-writers scoff at the notion. There really is no other way to describe it. Maybe all it means is that the writer has secured a pipeline to their own subconscious, so they write without ego or conscious thought interfering. Maybe it means that the writer is serving as a scribe to some higher power -- acting as the mouthpiece for some universal muse. As wacky as that sounds, I can imagine that -- often at the end of a writing session I would almost wake up, feeling a little bit used by something beyond my control. It's not as bad a feeling as you might think. It's pretty exhilirating. I can understand why the guys who wrote the Bible attributed their words to God -- whether or not that's true I won't debate, because I don't know -- because there is something holy about the process.

And that's what I sounded like all month: a new religious convert. But I lapsed during the month, and by the time Thanksgiving Weekend rolled around, I was 7,500 words behind schedule. So between helpings of turkey and trips to visit friends, I wrote. My god, how I wrote. On Sunday, November 25, I wrote 7,261 words. I wrote like a fuckin' hurricane. Nothing could stop me, not even a turkey-induced coma. I ended the weekend 1,300 words ahead of schedule. From Wednesday night to Sunday night, I wrote almost 16,000 words, a third of my required word count.

Then on the 27th came the crash. I had been a serious brat online the night before, and some of my friends had gotten good and tired of my obsession. Brand politely smacked me down, and pointed out that my novel was the most important thing in the world to me, as it should be, but it was not the most important thing to the rest of the world. He let me know what was going on in the outside world that I'd ignored during the month of November. I was stunned. And hurt. And pissed -- mostly at myself. I crashed hard. November 27th was easily the darkest day of the month. I was 5,000 words from my goal, and I didn't care if I made it or not. I spent the day not writing, and sulked.

Then that night he and I had a long talk, and in the process of resolving the whole issue of me ignoring people, we started talking about my story. And again, like absolute magic, the whole thing crystallized for me, beginning to end. All the disparate threads that had introduced themselves came together into one whole cloth and I saw the whole picture clearly. I was ecstatic in the truest sense of the word. I got off the phone with Brand at about 1 am, and promptly got up and started writing again, after scribbling a hasty note in my writing journal so I wouldn't forget the vision I'd had of the story. Now I know how Samuel Taylor Coleridge must have felt when the whole of "Kubla Khan" came to him. Unlike Sam, however, I wrote down bits of my vision before anybody could come knocking at my door. (Please note, I am in no way comparing The Host to any of Coleridge's poetry, writers are writers, and the process works regardless of talent.)

I crossed 50,000 words the next day. As of this writing, The Host is not a finished first draft. Right now I'm at 51,672 words, and I'm still plugging away at it. I've lost some of my NaNoWriMo momentum, but with finals coming up and with me trying to make up for all of the things I neglected during November, that's to be expected. Or so I keep telling myself. I want to finish it this month, then take January away from it (to work on some other writing projects I've got simmering, including one paying project for Tribe 8). Then in February, perhaps, I'll settle in with the whole draft and a red pen (or in my case, maybe a green or purple pen) and get back to work. I do want to submit this. I do think it's publishable, or will be.

When I got the contract to write Harvest of Thorns, my self-image went through a change. I was able to call myself a writer without flinching. It was a liberating, heady feeling. Now with about two-thirds of a finished novel under my belt, that same sort of sea change is happening again. Now I can say that I am not just a writer, I am an author (and there is a difference) -- I am a novelist, by god. It's an amazing feeling, and I'm trying not to let my head swell too much from it.

I don't know what all that means for this journal. I admit, right now my focus is completely on writing. I don't want to end things around here, but updates may be sporadic -- er, not that they weren't already. I feel like a brand-new door is open in front of me and I'm stepping through it. There's just no way I can not take you all through it with me.

Posted by Lisa at December 10, 2001 12:16 PM