Finished NaNoWriMo? You're Just Getting Started...

This is my last post about NaNoWriMo, I promise. November is almost over and I don’t have another
spot till December. 

I’m over the achievement porn of “these great novels were written in days!” I’m not saying anybody
is lying, but it is counterproductive (bordering on abusive) to shame writers by holding up stories of
extreme outliers like they’re the norm.  

My beloved writing mentor Joyce Sweeney, who was publishing books while I was playing with
Rainbow Brite, gave me an average of ten years from idea to publication for most of us. So…
where do the other nine years and eleven months go?

Don’t get me wrong. I completely believe these first drafts could have been written in days (although
I don’t know anyone who can take 2.5 days to not eat/sleep/go to work/etc and just write, whose
family doesn’t put them in a padded cell) but there’s no way any were a query-ready draft.  

You an absolutely write a strong outline or first draft in a month… if you have a solid story idea and
a decent handle on the craft of writing. Ransom Riggs once had a first draft of his first novel ever.
So did the lady in your SCBWI workshop who keeps screeching about the Illuminati and colony
collapse disorder.*

Nothing on the left can go into an engagement ring. Whether the stone on the right should... But you get the point.

But if you query your NaNoWriMo “finished product” come December 1, you’re going to wind up in
the 99.99999%. Not as in Occupy Your Hometown, but as in “the steaming hot mess of garbage
manuscripts flooding agents’ inboxes that will never even get read.” 

When everyone and their mother wants to be an author, and believes they can write the next The
Cat in The Hat on their iphone on their bathroom break, what we writers do is devalued. 

You need to rise above the sewage of the slush pile and show the agent your manuscript is not
last week’s moldy coffee grounds that got stuck to the mushy tinned broccoli that was in the fridge
for six months. 

But first, you have to make that true. 

If I were going to follow the NaNoWriMo schedule strictly, I’d add another month for something the
kiddies (or software developers, whichever you prefer) call a “hardening sprint”.  I’d call it
NaNoRevMo (National Novel Revising Month).

 Basically, you’ve written the manuscript (built the code), but if you want to make sure Draft 1 isn’t
a steaming hot mess** you have some clean-up work to do. 

Your “bugs” (flaws in the software) are typos, flat character arcs, details that need to be re-ordered
- anything really. 

December is crazy if you’re an adult (the only thing more depressing than learning there is no Santa
is having to be Santa) so we should do this in January: a boring cold month where everybody’s
grouchy and nothing happens.

Don’t expect those RESOLVED and agent-gonna-snap-you-up-and-promote-you-at-auction ready
in a month.

But it’s a start. 

______________________________________________________________________________

* True story. 

** And I promise you, it is. 

A Metrics Nerd Looks at NaNoWriMo

50K words in a month. That’s what NaNoWriMo tells us is a novel, that we can hammer out in November,

on a sugar high from our kids’ Halloween candy before it spoils. 

A chronic overwriter of a genre of books that skew shorter (Middle Grade, obviously) in a sub-genre that

skews long, I’m currently at 71.6K in my WIP/R&R. It’s probably pushing the limit, but that’s what I needed

to tell the story.

And yes, I signed up for NaNo, more for the public accountability and socializing with my online friends. 

That said, I’m O V E R word count as the sole metric for writing. 

Nerd Alert: I’m a management consultant/industrial engineer by trade.  That means the skills of my misspent

youth involved 80 hours a week studying and quantifying large organizations’ business processes and

examining/testing ways for them to reduce money and time spent to get the job done.

Like The Bobs from Office Space, except I’m better-looking. I’m also pretty sure most of my coworkers

have wondered at one point what planet I’m actually from. Oh well. 

Regardless, I hate bad metrics.  And any One Size Fits All metric across an entire operation is a bad one.

It’s a novel, not a pair of earrings. 

Word Count tries to be a One Size Fits All metric. It’s a great metric for a first draft. That’s really about it. 

My goals for November include: 

Finish the rest of the “Rewrite” part of the R&R

Metric: This is done when the story is told. I estimate another 5K words

Edit the document (Typos, dropped threads, missing plants… I have an ever-growing to-do checklist.

Metric: This is done when I’ve gone through all the pages, identified and made the edits. I estimate 300 pages.

Send the MS back out into the world

Metric: This is done… when the email is sent. 

Get through Thanksgiving alive (Local relatives are so accepting and kind that my computer will be joining me.)

Metric: Estimated five anecdotes about friends' cousins' hairdressers who self-published 2K-word

picture books in two weeks.

There are of course other operational processes (building my writer platform) such as being a Cybils panelist,

posting the 900 reviews in my WordPress drafts box, etc.  That’s another story for another day.

The elephant in the room (pink, winged, and shoots glitter out of its trunk if it’s in in one of my stories)

is that not all words written are created equal.  It’s OK for your first draft to be crap. Shannon Hale said

so, albeit less crassly (and thank you @jessiehgmetzger for the pretty graphic):

Above all, remember that Twitter humblebrag of 5K words written in a day (OK, I’ve done that but not regularly)

and stories of novels being written on a 3-day caffeine-or-worse bender held up like they’re the norm,

are only telling part of the story. 

“I spent years busting my butt” is just not a popular narrative in the writing community. We’re writers: We

know mundane and tedious will get you panned in a crit group. Same rule applies to telling your online

success story.  Set yourself apart from the mere mortal riffraff or perish, etc.

But, getting your crappy first draft down on paper is the first step, and having a group cheer you on as

your word count builds is a great way to keep yourself accountable. 

Just remember this is one piece of the puzzle. 

Oh, and I’m on NaNo if anyone wants to find me. In fact, please do so it looks like I do have friends.

Happy writing!