National Novel Writing Month has come and gone and for the first time in the many years I have called myself a writer and known about this event, I actually took part. Did I succeed? Hell yeah, I kicked the shit out of NaNoWriMo and loved it from Day One! I wrote a novel in 35 days and with some polish and editing, it could be one of my best works. So for all you future fans out there reading my old blog archives, here is how I did it... Humility
It's fun to be all cocky and proud on the back end of a new novel, when you're feeling invincible and brilliant, but going in, NaNoWriMo can be quite daunting. You have to write about 1700 words a day without any real planning or research and by the end of November you're supposed to have a 50,000 word novel. The key feature of the contest for me was the notion that if you don't hit your quota for the day, you don't have to make it up the next day. Period. You can go over it, or you can go short. But each day is it's own. You don't sweat it. You just keep going. This was a huge relief for me. It meant I could fail, and still succeed. It meant I could fail a lot, and as long as I started over each day, I could still hit that day's new goal and succeed. And I did fail many times. There were many days, especially around Thanksgiving and the weekends where I fell short of my word count. And at the end of November, my novel was not finished. It took me an extra five days to add the ending. But every day, I took a deep breath, accepted my own fallibility and started typing. It didn't have to be good. It didn't have to be smart. It just had to be words on a page. The freedom that comes with that humility is a writer's greatest asset. Title All I had when the month started was a title. Free or Best Offer. I came up with it a year earlier and decided I needed a story for it. I had a few ideas but none really worked. One involved an anti-hipster banjo player who sang on street corners. Another was some kind of Pay It Forward rip-off. I wasn't even sure what the phrase meant, only that I liked it. Day Zero Okay, I cheated. I was so excited and nervous that on October 31st, I couldn't wait any longer. I wrote about 180 words that night to kick off the novel. I like to put some thought into my opening sentences and paragraphs, not just to make them good, but to make them mean something about the novel that follows. Sometimes this can be a time sink, and I wanted it out of the way when I hit the ground running the next morning. "I listen to all the ads..." became not only my opening phrase, but a coda for the main character/narrator. Maniac If you haven't seen the new miniseries Maniac on Netflix staring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, you need to go check it out. It's amazing, and ended up being a huge influence on my story because I had just finished and couldn't get it out of my head. The first thing I thought when I saw it was I wanted to write like that. Vaguely sci-fi, psychological and socially conscious, but mostly just weird. I was inspired by some of the most throwaway elements of the show, namely their ideas about advertising in the first episode or two, and it's pervasive nature to produce human detachment. Very post-modern. It reminded me of an article I read about coffee shops on college campuses giving away free coffee and internet access to people who sign over their phone's metadata (the information that tracks all your internet activity, which when collated at a national scale helps companies find patterns in people's preferences so they know what to sell to whom; market research worth way more than coffee!). There was something about this notion of giving yourself away for free that felt like it was worth exploring. Suddenly Free or Best Offer was no longer about garage sale giveaways, but human desperation to belong to something. I decided all my characters would be giving themselves away in some fashion or another, and that you could get anything for free if you just tolerated the ads. Names The last time I wrote "near-future", semi-sci-fi stories, I named a kid Joss because I thought it was a cool name and I wanted the character to be cool. I figured, maybe in a few years, there really will be a bunch of Josses in the world, whose parents named them after Joss Whedon because they were such big fans. They might already exist, they just haven't come of age. So I decided to take this idea further and name all my characters after the celebrities and pop culture icons of the last decade or so, partly because there are a lot of cool names, and partly because that's sorta what everyone is actually doing. But also partly because it speaks to the post-modern way in which reality begins to reflect art. Letterman Jones. Stark Lin. Avril Jimenez. And my POV narrator, Coen, after the Coen Brothers. Coen's girlfriend Palin is named after Sarah Palin. The man with no name, they call Oliver Stone because he looks like he could come from one of his movies. And for fun, I added in an Argentine Joe Pesci at the end. A generation born out of pop culture. Free-Ex I introduced Coen and Letterman at a farmer's market which is equal parts community garage sale and open-air swap-meet. I still couldn't get that vibe out of my head from the original Free or Best Offer ideas, and it felt like the right kind of environment to start in. A place where things are bought and sold to capture the spirit of a consumer society where everything is an object and a product. Including people. And in the middle of this place where everything has a price, I put one lone stranger giving away something for free. A TV. Of course it's a TV. This is what the TV represents as a symbol, in my mind: for multiple generations over decades, you could watch television for free because the commercials paid for it. This is a microcosm of all my themes boiled down into one perfectly Americana icon. Perhaps one day I'll put one on the cover... Midwest City Like one of my previous projects in this same style and genre (an unfinished WIP called Proselyte), I chose to place the story vaguely in the "near" future in a vaguely Midwestern city which is not named. I like to have the freedom to reference both current fads, celebrities, and trends, as well as upcoming technology and advancements hovering just beyond the horizon. Likewise, I prefer to mash all the cities together that I know and love around my region, so that it feels universally relatable but tangibly specific. By withholding a date and a city name, my hope is to retain an element of timelessness just a little longer than I otherwise would've. Act II in Ten Days Each new chapter I introduced new characters, new ideas, and new settings. I added roommates for Coen, a MacGuffin, a new job, the West Mall, new hurdles to overcome (parking tickets), and a series of interludes designed to illuminate random yet subtle details to his backstory. I was exploring my theme. Every scene was a chance to demonstrate how these characters were just giving themselves away. But by day ten, I had a realization: time was running out. I couldn't just explore my characters and get to know them gradually through their day-to-day routine forever. These are introductory details suitable only for Act I, and I had to move forward with the meat of the story or I'd run out of time. Act II required I start following up with what I'd started and show change. No new characters. No new settings. It was time to circle back and shake things up. We have our second encounter with Oliver Stone and his free TV. We have our second scene with Letterman, trading junk for junk. Coen goes after the girl he met at the mall, and finds her online. Each revisitation gives us a little more about who the characters are and what they value, but mostly it moves them forward. Stark gets a new job. Letterman has a new product to trade. Coen has a date lined up. And then we return to the Free-Ex, at almost exactly the half-way point (as it turns out) to play out the MacGuffin I inserted. The comic book that's gonna get him tons of cash and solve his rent problems blows up in his face. It fails. And this advances the plot, because now he has to make hard choices. Climax Almost as quickly as Act II came upon me, I realized November was coming to a close. I needed to start wrapping things up. But didn't I just start this novel like the other day? I knew if I had any hope of this resembling a working novel when I was done, I had to stick to the three act structure. Introduction. Reiteration. Payoff. There are many ways to summarize or define the three act structure, but the point is that it works. Not all novelists abide by it, but almost all movies do, and I like movies because even when they're no good, they usually make sense. The structure works. That means all the stuff I'd been writing had to come to a head. No more teases. No more clues. No more development. Just consequences. The rent has come due. Coen has to make his dramatic choice between his mom and his media addiction. We finally catch up with Oliver Stone. Avril and Palin become friends and it's awkward for Coen. All the plot lines converge but when they do it creates a compression. A tension. A story is only as good as the tension between two choices that the protagonist must make. He has to want both things and they have to invariably come to an impasse. For the whole month of NaNoWriMo I was pursuing two mostly unrelated plot lines: the advertising job and Coen's money problems were the A-Plot, and then the free TVs were the B-Plot. I had to craft a way to make them speak to each other, and put them in opposition. I had to put the free TVs at war with the advertisements. For that I had to go back to my theme, about giving yourself away. The opposite of giving is taking. If the free TVs are all about giving, the advertising stuff is all about taking. Makes sense. Ads are only as useful as their ability to take your money in exchange for whatever junk they're selling, right? If the ad company is an institutional capitalist pyramid scheme, then the free TV side of things is a communist revolution. A cult. All his friends join that cult and drink the Kool Aid, but Coen can't let go of his ad subsidized media lifestyle. He's caught between them right up to the climax where he must make one last dramatic choice between himself and his friends. Boom. Now you have a story. Sticking the Landing Except I couldn't stick the landing. I wanted so desperately to tie it all up on November 30th and I was so close. I was on the last chapter and I spent the whole night writing. Well over 3000 words, if I recall. But I couldn't pull it together. It was getting away from me. The contest was over. I had surpassed the goal, about 63,000 words total, but it wasn't finished. I spent the next five days reviewing a few key scenes and doing a little editing, but mostly just reminding myself of the stuff I had written. It's hard to keep track of all the seeds you planted when you just keep moving forward and never look back to water them. Slowly it began to come together again and I realized how exactly to finish it. On Day 35 it was done. The last words were written. Spit-Shine Time to see what I had. I was feeling good about it. Very good. But I was also cautious. I had no idea what I would find when I read it for the first time. I also had a long list of things to add or fix which had started to occur to me, now that it was over. I spent the next ten days reading and editing my rough draft. I rewrote a couple half scenes, including the ending to include the other characters. I wanted them all there at the end when Coen makes his decision to [REDACTED]. I moved a couple interlude chapters around, but mostly I left things as they were. I didn't want to start overthinking it. I wanted to let the rough draft be the rough draft. I didn't write a novel for NaNoWriMo. I wrote a rough draft, and for all its eccentric indulgences, I think I'm proud of it. The final word count is about 73,000. A fair size novel. Beta Reading Another thing I've never done is have Beta Readers to give me their thoughts. Besides my wife, I've never really had anyone care. Because I did the contest with a friend, and spent the whole month talking about it along the way, I ended up with about a dozen interested eavesdroppers and friends currently reading it as we speak. Their feedback will help shape the final form of this novel and determine just how much work it needs to be made presentable. Final Product It's anyone's guess how much work I have ahead of me before this novel goes public, but initial reactions combined with my own gut instincts tell me this could be a turning point in my writing career. It might be my boldest, best work yet. It might be one step closer to that great American novel of my generation that I've always been building toward.
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