NaNo Retroview and Thanksgiving
Alright. I've totally had six hours of sleep and three glasses of wine, so I am probably mentally competent to talk about NaNoWriMo.
So. Despite having won NaNo a grand total of 7 times now (2006, then 2008-2013; I failed in 2003 and 2005), I still feel like I have not remotely figured out how the fuck to do this thing.
This year had some good things and some bad things going for it, and I'll hit those up in order. (Often they are the same things!)
Outlining - Every year but this that I've beaten NaNo, I had a chapter by chapter outline in my writing software of choice (or, in the case of 2006/2008, in a notebook) done before 11/1. This has had advantages and disadvantages; the primary advantage is that when a scene is adamantly not working, I skip to the next interesting one. (Usually it's not working because it either needs a fundamental shift in what the hell I am doing with it, or it flat-out doesn't need to be there.) The disadvantage is that when I stumble onto an interesting thread in an early chapter, I don't have time during NaNo to rework the outline the way it needs to be done, so I either write it "wrong" because what I'm doing is no longer what I want to do, or I have to take precious writing time to rework the outline.
This year, I outlined the first six chapters on Halloween night before I lost all attention span. I had a 2000-word overview of the main plot, so I knew at least mostly where I was going, but I hadn't broken it all down into the chapters and scenes I needed to get there. When I got into chapter 5 of that outline, I added the next 5, and rinsed and repeated. I tend to write chapters of roughly 2k, so I knew I needed about 25 chapters to win NaNo and 50 to finish the book. This became a problem midway through the month during The Week of Fuck My Life, about which more when I talk about pacing, but I got through the first half okay. Then I had to scramble to outline the rest during aforementioned week, and the resultant scramble is very....dubious in quality. Which translated into the chapters I wrote for it.
Pacing - I always fuck this one up. The first time I won, in 2006, I did so on the 29th, very late. After that, I always had to beat it better. My personal record was, I think, 2011? Maybe 2010? Whichever, the year I finished typing the 50,000th word at 12:01 AM on the 25th, aka "FUCK YEAH VALIDATION IS OPEN." But see, the problem with my particular brainweasels is that it is never enough to do, I must always do better. My brain moves the goalposts. Sure you beat NaNo, but not as efficiently as you could have, slackass! Sure you beat NaNo, but that isn't a finished draft, worthless thing! Etc. and so on. For the last few years I've done this thing where I dive headfirst in, averaging 2.5K a day and 3-4K on Fridays, and then burn myself out by the time I get to 40K and the end is a drag.
This year, I tried to do it better. I was going to write 2k a day, ideally 2200, and I was going to take Sundays off. This actually worked great for the first two weeks, but week 3 of NaNoWriMo is first of all where the "this entire book sucks!" starts to hit (30-40K is the absolute worst stretch for me; I don't fear Week 2, I fear Week 3) and also this year happened to be the week of Rina doesn't fucking sleep. I don't know what the hell was wrong, but every night was "go to bed late and then you can't sleep and you wake up and you can't go back to sleep and LOL FUCK MY LIFE." Week 3 was the week of forcing myself to barely hit minimum word count. So then I didn't get Sunday #4 off, and being in the middle of the 30s was not helping at all. AND THEN it turned out that, rather than having the entirety of the Thanksgiving weekend to write (which I...never do well at anyway, hence part of the previous paragraph where I go full steam ahead trying to get done before that), I was going to have Family Obligations Friday and Saturday.
Suddenly my totally reasonable plan had to account for two fewer writing days, aka "you previously had six days to do 10K, now you have four. Have fun." I got it done - largely because i got a boost from "oh, oh HEY WAIT I'M OVER 40K THERE IS AN END TO THIS" - but it was not pretty and most of it needs to die in a fire. (I may actually print things and burn them. I don't like them.)
Length - not girth. Okay. So 50K is a difficult but reasonable amount to write in a month. The problem is that in my genre, novel MS length is 80-100K. The novel I started this time is the fifth different novel I've done for NaNo (yeah, I'm a rebel; 2006 and 2008 were one massive beast that finally clocked in at 270K, that being Every Light Casts A Shadow, and then 2009 was its own thing. 2010 and 2011 were book 1 of this trilogy, 2012 was book 2, and this year I did book 3. At five completed novels, I have a pretty solid idea of how much plot fits into 100K worth of MS (we don't talk about the runaway train that is Every Light shut the fuck up Highwind I'm over you [this is a lie I'm never over him]). So I hit a really depressing point at about 30K where I'm in the Dreaded Middle. Not only am I in the middle of the story, but I am painfully aware that EVEN WHEN I GET TO 50K, I DON'T GET TO BE DONE. There is a whole other chunk, JUST AS HUGE AND BAD, on the other side. So why bother? This novel is crap, it looks nothing like the novel in my head, and oh my god I'm going to be stuck here in the middle forever by myself, excuse me while I quit life.
(As is probably obvious by now, my particular anxiety and inferiority-complex brainweasels have a goddamn field day with NaNo.)
And lastly, Rewards. Okay. So. As vaguely mentioned under pacing above, it is never enough to do; I must always do better. This has a nasty cousin in the form of my brain helpfully deciding that my reward for NaNo is finish the fucking novel you useless little shit, why do you think you get something for getting halfway? This is...so many kinds of unhelpful I don't even think I can enumerate them, because the thing about a brain that likes to move the goalposts is that it never stops moving them. If I finish the draft, why the fuck haven't I edited it yet? Oh, it's edited? Where's your query letter to an agent? Why don't you have an agent yet? Where's the next novel? WHY DO YOU SUCK SO MUCH?
So I clearly need better rewards (and maybe a brain that isn't a horrible broken weasel-eaten shitpile, but I digress) but I don't...even know what to give myself. And I think that rewards and length are really the two major challenges that I have yet to overcome for NaNo. Pacing, I have ideas about what works and what doesn't (This year's plan was great until the Week of Not Sleeping followed by LOL Two Fewer Writing Days!!); outlining I more or less have figured out (and mostly the latter half of the outline was a disaster due to the not sleeping, we have a recurring theme here.) But I am not yet sure how to conquer the knowledge that winning NaNo only gets me halfway there. Or how to reward myself without my brain sabotaging it.
In less navel-gazing news, it's been a very family-oriented weekend, and I'm not done yet. I love my family, but wow do I really just want to go hide in a corner with a video game for like three days. We had a relatively small, for us, Thanksgiving dinner--mom, dad, me,
benjamin_dunbar, my aunt Snooze, my Nana, my godfather and his wife and my cousin. The usual--an amazingly delicious glazed ham courtesy Nana, the best sweet potato casserole ever courtesy same, mashed potatoes, lima beans, broccoli, turkey, homemade stuffing, gravy, Jell-O mold (lime jello, pineapple chunks, cream cheese--LISTEN DON'T KNOCK IT BEST THING ON THE TABLE), cranberry sauce, and rolls. I did a pretty good job of taking an enjoyable amount of everything so that at the end of the meal I'd had all the delicious things and I was full but I was not uncomfortable. Then we had peach and pumpkin pie for dessert. It was so good. Every amazing food.
Today we drove down to see Mady, who's basically my second mom. I hadn't seen her kids in...ages; they are about 10 years older than I. They are an amazing part of our family and I'm really looking forward to seeing them next year for the wedding; we laughed and talked and ate lasagna my mother made from scratch (okay, she didn't culture the cheese or make the noodles, but everything else.) I had many glasses of wine. This is, to me, what family at Thanksgiving should be; the people you love and who love you, whether you got them by blood or chose them for yourself. I have blood family I would gladly drop-kick off a cliff, but none of them were involved this year. Just the ones who raised me and laughed with me and scolded me when I needed it. Being home and surrounded by family is intense, but I never doubt that I am loved and wanted here. That's a good thing to remember.
And now my hand hurts (I tore up my thumb something fierce on the plane digging in my bag for something--no idea what chewed on me but it was angry--and it's my right thumb, which means I use it for everything and especially typing. The last 8k of NaNo was pretty hideously painful because I always space with my right thumb and every time I hit space it hurt. It seems to have calmed down today. Hopefully it stays that way.) So I am going to go lie down and play Picross or maybe just sleep.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1082376.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
So. Despite having won NaNo a grand total of 7 times now (2006, then 2008-2013; I failed in 2003 and 2005), I still feel like I have not remotely figured out how the fuck to do this thing.
This year had some good things and some bad things going for it, and I'll hit those up in order. (Often they are the same things!)
Outlining - Every year but this that I've beaten NaNo, I had a chapter by chapter outline in my writing software of choice (or, in the case of 2006/2008, in a notebook) done before 11/1. This has had advantages and disadvantages; the primary advantage is that when a scene is adamantly not working, I skip to the next interesting one. (Usually it's not working because it either needs a fundamental shift in what the hell I am doing with it, or it flat-out doesn't need to be there.) The disadvantage is that when I stumble onto an interesting thread in an early chapter, I don't have time during NaNo to rework the outline the way it needs to be done, so I either write it "wrong" because what I'm doing is no longer what I want to do, or I have to take precious writing time to rework the outline.
This year, I outlined the first six chapters on Halloween night before I lost all attention span. I had a 2000-word overview of the main plot, so I knew at least mostly where I was going, but I hadn't broken it all down into the chapters and scenes I needed to get there. When I got into chapter 5 of that outline, I added the next 5, and rinsed and repeated. I tend to write chapters of roughly 2k, so I knew I needed about 25 chapters to win NaNo and 50 to finish the book. This became a problem midway through the month during The Week of Fuck My Life, about which more when I talk about pacing, but I got through the first half okay. Then I had to scramble to outline the rest during aforementioned week, and the resultant scramble is very....dubious in quality. Which translated into the chapters I wrote for it.
Pacing - I always fuck this one up. The first time I won, in 2006, I did so on the 29th, very late. After that, I always had to beat it better. My personal record was, I think, 2011? Maybe 2010? Whichever, the year I finished typing the 50,000th word at 12:01 AM on the 25th, aka "FUCK YEAH VALIDATION IS OPEN." But see, the problem with my particular brainweasels is that it is never enough to do, I must always do better. My brain moves the goalposts. Sure you beat NaNo, but not as efficiently as you could have, slackass! Sure you beat NaNo, but that isn't a finished draft, worthless thing! Etc. and so on. For the last few years I've done this thing where I dive headfirst in, averaging 2.5K a day and 3-4K on Fridays, and then burn myself out by the time I get to 40K and the end is a drag.
This year, I tried to do it better. I was going to write 2k a day, ideally 2200, and I was going to take Sundays off. This actually worked great for the first two weeks, but week 3 of NaNoWriMo is first of all where the "this entire book sucks!" starts to hit (30-40K is the absolute worst stretch for me; I don't fear Week 2, I fear Week 3) and also this year happened to be the week of Rina doesn't fucking sleep. I don't know what the hell was wrong, but every night was "go to bed late and then you can't sleep and you wake up and you can't go back to sleep and LOL FUCK MY LIFE." Week 3 was the week of forcing myself to barely hit minimum word count. So then I didn't get Sunday #4 off, and being in the middle of the 30s was not helping at all. AND THEN it turned out that, rather than having the entirety of the Thanksgiving weekend to write (which I...never do well at anyway, hence part of the previous paragraph where I go full steam ahead trying to get done before that), I was going to have Family Obligations Friday and Saturday.
Suddenly my totally reasonable plan had to account for two fewer writing days, aka "you previously had six days to do 10K, now you have four. Have fun." I got it done - largely because i got a boost from "oh, oh HEY WAIT I'M OVER 40K THERE IS AN END TO THIS" - but it was not pretty and most of it needs to die in a fire. (I may actually print things and burn them. I don't like them.)
Length - not girth. Okay. So 50K is a difficult but reasonable amount to write in a month. The problem is that in my genre, novel MS length is 80-100K. The novel I started this time is the fifth different novel I've done for NaNo (yeah, I'm a rebel; 2006 and 2008 were one massive beast that finally clocked in at 270K, that being Every Light Casts A Shadow, and then 2009 was its own thing. 2010 and 2011 were book 1 of this trilogy, 2012 was book 2, and this year I did book 3. At five completed novels, I have a pretty solid idea of how much plot fits into 100K worth of MS (we don't talk about the runaway train that is Every Light shut the fuck up Highwind I'm over you [this is a lie I'm never over him]). So I hit a really depressing point at about 30K where I'm in the Dreaded Middle. Not only am I in the middle of the story, but I am painfully aware that EVEN WHEN I GET TO 50K, I DON'T GET TO BE DONE. There is a whole other chunk, JUST AS HUGE AND BAD, on the other side. So why bother? This novel is crap, it looks nothing like the novel in my head, and oh my god I'm going to be stuck here in the middle forever by myself, excuse me while I quit life.
(As is probably obvious by now, my particular anxiety and inferiority-complex brainweasels have a goddamn field day with NaNo.)
And lastly, Rewards. Okay. So. As vaguely mentioned under pacing above, it is never enough to do; I must always do better. This has a nasty cousin in the form of my brain helpfully deciding that my reward for NaNo is finish the fucking novel you useless little shit, why do you think you get something for getting halfway? This is...so many kinds of unhelpful I don't even think I can enumerate them, because the thing about a brain that likes to move the goalposts is that it never stops moving them. If I finish the draft, why the fuck haven't I edited it yet? Oh, it's edited? Where's your query letter to an agent? Why don't you have an agent yet? Where's the next novel? WHY DO YOU SUCK SO MUCH?
So I clearly need better rewards (and maybe a brain that isn't a horrible broken weasel-eaten shitpile, but I digress) but I don't...even know what to give myself. And I think that rewards and length are really the two major challenges that I have yet to overcome for NaNo. Pacing, I have ideas about what works and what doesn't (This year's plan was great until the Week of Not Sleeping followed by LOL Two Fewer Writing Days!!); outlining I more or less have figured out (and mostly the latter half of the outline was a disaster due to the not sleeping, we have a recurring theme here.) But I am not yet sure how to conquer the knowledge that winning NaNo only gets me halfway there. Or how to reward myself without my brain sabotaging it.
In less navel-gazing news, it's been a very family-oriented weekend, and I'm not done yet. I love my family, but wow do I really just want to go hide in a corner with a video game for like three days. We had a relatively small, for us, Thanksgiving dinner--mom, dad, me,
benjamin_dunbar, my aunt Snooze, my Nana, my godfather and his wife and my cousin. The usual--an amazingly delicious glazed ham courtesy Nana, the best sweet potato casserole ever courtesy same, mashed potatoes, lima beans, broccoli, turkey, homemade stuffing, gravy, Jell-O mold (lime jello, pineapple chunks, cream cheese--LISTEN DON'T KNOCK IT BEST THING ON THE TABLE), cranberry sauce, and rolls. I did a pretty good job of taking an enjoyable amount of everything so that at the end of the meal I'd had all the delicious things and I was full but I was not uncomfortable. Then we had peach and pumpkin pie for dessert. It was so good. Every amazing food.
Today we drove down to see Mady, who's basically my second mom. I hadn't seen her kids in...ages; they are about 10 years older than I. They are an amazing part of our family and I'm really looking forward to seeing them next year for the wedding; we laughed and talked and ate lasagna my mother made from scratch (okay, she didn't culture the cheese or make the noodles, but everything else.) I had many glasses of wine. This is, to me, what family at Thanksgiving should be; the people you love and who love you, whether you got them by blood or chose them for yourself. I have blood family I would gladly drop-kick off a cliff, but none of them were involved this year. Just the ones who raised me and laughed with me and scolded me when I needed it. Being home and surrounded by family is intense, but I never doubt that I am loved and wanted here. That's a good thing to remember.
And now my hand hurts (I tore up my thumb something fierce on the plane digging in my bag for something--no idea what chewed on me but it was angry--and it's my right thumb, which means I use it for everything and especially typing. The last 8k of NaNo was pretty hideously painful because I always space with my right thumb and every time I hit space it hurt. It seems to have calmed down today. Hopefully it stays that way.) So I am going to go lie down and play Picross or maybe just sleep.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1082376.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.