I took part in 2013 and completed the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. Here’s part of what I said about the experience at the time:
We take writing for granted because it's an everyday task, something the average person with a high school education can do, but to put together a story good enough to be sold on the market? I don't care whether you're the hackiest hack writer that ever owned a typewriter or Stephen King, it ain't as easy as it looks, and I have new respect for anyone who does it on a regular basis.
People on the NaNo message boards planned trilogies and even entire series based on what they created. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that many of the participants I saw worked in sci-fi or fantasy, unlike me. I thought they were crazy, that they should concentrate on finishing one book first.
At real-life NaNo writing sessions, I didn’t make many new friends. I cared more about writing. 50,000 words seemed daunting. Completing it as soon as possible was my concern.
It was tough.
My sketch of a plot involved five main characters, believe it or not. Inspired by a graphic novel that did something similar, I foolishly thought I could present each one’s perspective throughout the story. Of course, what worked in one medium didn’t necessarily work in another. Certainly not for a novice like me.
Whenever I got stuck, lists, song lyrics, quotes, and similar tricks padded my daily word count. It wasn’t as if I had no experience writing stories; the problem was the pressure of achieving 50,000 words in thirty days. NaNo, to me, felt like a serious contest, in which I’d be “penalized” for coming up short.
I hit my goal, but as a story it was incomplete. After looking it over, I cut most of the characters and focused on one of the leads.
Re-workings and expansions followed, exploring her character in greater depth and birthing new ones. I went on instinct, based on my rudimentary ideas of what constituted a good story and my experience creating stories. I joined a real-life writers group, plus a virtual one, and made more writer friends. Soon, I found the blogs of writing gurus, such as Emma Darwin, and learned all I could about writing fiction.
How much I didn’t know shocked me.
Eventually a new lead character complemented my previous one. I thought of him and her as co-leads, as in a movie. My revised story built upon their relationship.
My finished draft was around 70-80,000 words. It took about a decade. In time I decided not to pursue publishing it, but I learned a lot about writing a contemporary work of fiction while writing it.
And it all began with NaNo.
The NaNo organization’s demise is unfortunate, but any like-minded group of writers can get together and choose to write 50,000 words in thirty days. Perhaps the concept will reincarnate in some other form in the future. It’s possible.
Writing culture
A recent article addressed using the advantages of prose over other mediums to delve into a character’s inner life.
There’s a reference to “TV brain” as a hindrance. In a side discussion I saw about this post on Facebook, one commenter stated the distractions of TV and social media keeps one less inside one’s head than before, which may account for a lesser emphasis on “interiority” in prose by newer writers.
I can see that. In recent years, mass media has gotten louder, both audibly and visually, like video screens getting bigger and more ubiquitous. Finding a quiet space in public has gotten harder (does every public bathroom have to have music piping into it?). If “interiority” has diminished, it’s little wonder, when so many spaces are more determined than ever to push someone else’s thoughts on you.
From the article:
Perhaps the dominance of visual narrative forms means that readers simply want prose that reads like TV and I’m simply in “old man yells at cloud” territory. But then, I am an old man, or at least have the gray hair of one. And I think the risks of “TV brain prose” are ones we all face. Even most published novelists—and I include myself here—consume more visual narratives than prose narratives, which makes it harder to switch on your “prose brain” when writing.
Given all the aural and visual pollution in the ether, I can see why writing gurus offer retreats, to get away from it all and focus on one’s work.
Shutting out the world’s clutter, for me, takes a greater effort. It had reached the point where I, too, had wondered whether the problem was me—that I had just gotten too old and crabby.
I’m no longer certain of that.
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There was a movie on Tubi I had seen before, but I watched it again. Stranger Than Fiction stars Will Ferrell in a rare dramatic role as an ordinary guy who discovers he’s a character in a novel, one destined to die by the author, Emma Thompson. As a meditation on destiny and free will, it’s interesting, but I wanna talk about the notion that characters can have wills of their own.
In my unpublished story born from NaNo, a supporting character began as a peripheral one and grew slightly in revisions. At some point, as my plot became clearer in my mind, so did her role, and her take on events in the story.
It was as if she “spoke” to me, demanding to be heard.
She factored in a pivotal scene late in the story, a new one, where she urges the antagonist to take a course of action. I loved writing it because it allowed her to reveal more about who she is and why her perspective mattered to the antagonist. My climax changed as a result.
In Fiction, once Thompson discovers Ferrell is a real person, whose fate is determined by her actions as a writer, she develops doubts about her ending, despite her manuscript being the best thing she’s ever written. Ultimately, she chooses not to “kill her darling”—literally.
The movie doesn’t get into literary issues much, though Dustin Hoffman plays a college professor who discusses literature with Ferrell in a couple of scenes. It’s a meta-fantasy, in a similar vein to The Truman Show. Worth watching.
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Another movie I rewatched on Tubi that had a writing theme was Throw Momma From the Train, a comedic remake of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. There are stereotypical amateur writers and talk about how to write a murder mystery, but mostly the movie’s about how to pull off a murder, in the silliest way possible. Not the funniest, but watchable.
Reading culture
The more you learn about how to write fiction, the more you discover sometimes, published books you like don’t always jibe with what you’ve learned. It can be frustrating.
I recently re-read Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, a fun, thrilling adventure story by all accounts, despite how whitebread most of the pop culture references are (I’m sorry, but it’s true).
What I also noticed, though, something the average reader wouldn’t care about but it stood out to me, was Cline’s wordiness in his writing. He’s fond, for example, of the phrase “began to,” as in “Parzival began to log into the OASIS,” or “Art3mis began to enter the first gate,” as if they’re starting to do something, but haven’t actually done it yet, when he means the opposite. Cline also uses filters in his first-person narration, as in “I saw the Sixers attack the gunters” instead of just writing “The Sixers attacked the gunters” and trusting the reader to know the sentence is written from Parzival’s perspective. Both these things make the book more verbose than it should be.
After seeing similar examples over and over, it got on my nerves—but when I first bought RP1 years ago, before I got serious about my writing, I never noticed it. I wouldn’t have cared if I did.
This isn’t meant to knock Cline (or his editors). RP1 is a huge hit. Nothing I say will change that. It’s just to point out an example of how once you learn about writing fiction, you can’t go back to the way you read before, when you read just for fun. Well, I suppose you can, but it’s difficult to ignore the things you’ve had ingrained in you about what constitutes quality writing. I still believe those things are true, though. I’ve seen them repeated by too many gurus to believe otherwise. Nothing, however, is carved in stone when it comes to approaches to fiction.
If you receive feedback that you are “breaking” a writing rule, make sure whoever provides that feedback is able to explain why they think it is a problem…. What they should be able to tell you is a) if it is working for your story and b) what are the implications or consequences of making that choice.
RP1 is still a cool book. Haven’t read the sequel yet.
Miscellany
Spillwords published my short story “Celluloid Heroine.” It’s another story set in my fictitious town of Thurber, but it’s a special one because I wrote it in memory of my late friend Paddy.
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After Micromance Magazine accepted my historical romance story (another story from me is due there in September), I decided to subscribe to their Substack, even though I’m not a romance writer. To be honest, I’m more interested in the periodic editorials of editor-in-chief G. Lynn Brown.
In May she wrote about genre bias in literary awards. I’m uncertain if historical fiction counts as a genre the way something like romance does, but I found it interesting that genre fiction is under-appreciated with awards judges like say, comedy, is given short shrift by Oscar voters.
I have yet to receive a literary award.
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For a local anthology, I submitted an essay in which the subject was personal. For weeks, I had debated on how much to reveal. I settled on an amount I considered sufficient, but it was tempting to write about more, in the belief that it would improve my chances at acceptance.
That is a very, very fine line to walk, my friends. On my previous blog, there were moments where I might’ve said too much. Don’t know and I doubt I ever will. If you find yourself in such a situation, all I can say is use your best judgment and make sure you can live with the consequences.
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Reminder: my new page for reviewing historical fiction books is updated as often as possible. I can’t guarantee this will be once a month, but I’ll do my best to keep it going.
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