Review: No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty
No Plot? No Problem! was recommended on 
write_away's writing advice book rec thread. It's by National Novel-Writing Month founder Chris Baty, and purports to be a road map to the process of writing a 50,000-word draft of a novel in one calendar month.
The book did at least one thing right for me as a reader: It got me excited about the idea of drafting a novel in a month and I decided to dive in with my own long-dreamed-of novel. I also decided to put off the review of the book until after I had tried the challenge so that I would have a handle on the subject matter. That chance came when I entered the July Novel Writing Month and Camp NaNoWriMo challenges. The following is my recounting of my NaNo experience along with the review of No Plot? No Problem! week-by-week, following the organization of the book.
Week -1: Revving Up
Mood: Excited
I went to the JulNoWriMo site first mainly based on a misunderstanding that I'm embarrassed to admit: I thought Camp meant a physical camp, which was right out because I don't live in the States and had to work. Yes yes, laugh all you like. I eventually joined the Camp NaNo site as well after realizing my mistake.
Still, I got one awesome thing out of JulNo: Their spreadsheet, which tracks not only the daily word count but also hours spent writing, plus morale. Keeping track of writing time is a habit I plan to take with me for the long term, thanks to JulNo. Morale, not so much: not only is it hard to sum up my mood for an entire day into a number, but it's also irrelevant. It doesn't matter how good or bad I feel when it comes to doing work. (Says the woman who did a week of Jack Squat during the month, but more on that later.)
The Camp NaNo site has the option for authors to form up into private groups called "cabins," and I joined one composed of fantasy/historical writers. Luckily mine was an active and dedicated one, though about half the writers fell away by the end. I also didn't get as much writing talk in the cabin as I'd expected, since chatter mainly centered around word counts, and in one case a personal disaster when a cabin mate's progress melted away in a disk failure.
My main community experience for this month came through the
go_nano community, which began as a place for write_away members doing Camp. Throughout the month co-admin Téa (
graychalk) and I did daily check-in posts where members could chime in with their word counts, triumphs, trials, and tribulations. I think the sense of being in this thing together helped me and the others tremendously.
In addition to my spreadsheet, cabin, and comm, I spent the final week before July on some last-minute research and outlining. I wrote some 8,000 words just setting up characters and outlining scenes, using a system set down by John Truby in The Anatomy of Story. I would end up throwing away pretty much all of this prep material, as discussed later. Still, going into Week 1 I had my scene index cards laid nicely out in Scrivener ready to be filled in. I thought I knew how my story was supposed to go and what deeper meaning it conveyed. I thought, in short, I was ready.
Week 1: Pedal to the Metal
Mood: Exuberant?
The first week was just as Baty had promised--easy, breezy. Carried on a strong wind, I was writing faster and more easily than I ever had on my life.
It was also going more quickly than I had been led to believe. The challenge was to write 50,000 in a month, but I had 40,492 by Day 7. This was partly driven by rivalry with a cabin-mate and by the sheer brag value on the go_nano community where I was making daily posts. It probably helped that I had read No Plot and knew about the philosophy of "exuberant imperfection," basically producing without censoring or editing by making quantity, not quality, the name of the game. I had also done a lot of freewriting, having read a book about it (Accidental Genius by Mark Levy) and done it regularly, especially after taking up the Artist's Way creativity course by Julia Cameron. Also I have a good base typing speed, 83 wpm on Dvorak according to an online test I took.
Due to all these different factors my writing flew along, though it was evident that I was writing a lot of crap. After reading No PlotI had resigned myself to that, but more seriously it was getting clearer that I was going in the wrong direction fast. The plan I had lovingly laid out the week before resulted in an incoherent mess in practice. I could go back after the month was over to edit and make things better, of course, but a polished turd is still a turd. I kept grimly on with these thoughts, even if the exuberant imperfection was feeling decidedly lighter on exuberance and heavier on imperfection.
Week 2: A Resounding Crash
Mood: Stuck
Thus I careened into Week 2, which Baty had warned would be the hardest week. Since I was on such a roll already I decided this would be my week to meet the 50K goal. I had a major work event on July 10 and a weekend trip scheduled afterward. Besides, I hated what I was writing so much I just wanted to stop, one way or the other. Since I had bet my husband that I would eat dog meat (literally) if I didn't meet my goal, quitting wasn't an option and it would have been ridiculous to stop with only 7,000 words left. It helped that another cabin member was very close to the goal as well and we were in a race to get there first.
I reached 50,080 words on July 9. From July 10 to July 13 I didn't write another word. Part of it was the work event on July 10 and the weekend getaway from July 12 to 13. Partly I was burned out after writing so much in such a short time. Mostly, though, I was feeling uncertain and indecisive. I had my 50K words, but I knew they were the wrong words in the wrong direction. Worse, I didn't know what the right words and the right direction looked like. I had over half the month left, but couldn't decide whether to go on or stop there.
Téa, my co-admin in the go_nano community, encouraged me to find a new direction for my story, and on my weekend trip with my husband I finally found it. I discussed my troubles with him, leading to the following exchange:
Hubs: Why not make the love interest the bad guy?
Me: No no, that's so cliché.
Hubs: So what? Sometimes it pays to be obvious.
Me: Well... I guess if I did that, I'd have a clear central conflict... and he doesn't have to be a mustache-twirling bad guy, but someone with compelling reasons to do what he- wow, that actually works!
Hubs: Of course it does, I came up with it.
My lifemate's unbecoming lack of modesty aside, I realized this was the direction the story needed to go. It changed everything, meaning my 8,000 words of preparation, not to mention my 50,000 words written thus far, would go out the window. That was a sacrifice I was happy to make, though. It helped that my Camp NaNo words had been written in haste and without much in the way of craftsmanship. As Téa later pointed out, I would have had a far harder time giving those words up if I had spent more time and effort wandering down dead ends.
So I ended up experiencing the second-week slump Baty mentioned, despite meeting my initial word goal. After this new direction was in place, I was cautiously optimistic going into the third week.
Week 3: Fits and Starts
Mood: Smug
I knocked out 2,419 words the day after I got back from my trip. I didn't bother with a new outline this time, and for perspective it should be noted I outline everything, even little 1,000-word stories. For one thing I was in much too big a hurry to pound the words out, and for another I really didn't know where I was going. I wrote in irregular spurts, going as low as 330 words a day at one point. Eventually I set myself the goal of writing another 50,000 words before the end of the month and was motivated to write thousands of words a day again.
Chris Baty describes Week 3 as a euphoric time, and I guess it was that way for me, too. Mostly I was relieved that I had a story I could believe in after 50,000 words of trial-and-error. My words-per-hour rate fell from my first-week highs, but I was enjoying the product more and hummed along into Week 4.
Week 4: To the Finish Line
Mood: Determined
There was no more serious drama after that, at least as far as real life went. The characters on the page, on the other hand, went through the wringer, pushed to deeds they never thought themselves capable of, changing their relationships and lives irrevocably through their choices, going to their limits and beyond for what they believed in. I cried for what they were going through, thrilled at their feats, berated them for their mistakes, and laughed out loud at their moments of levity.
After the anguish of the first two weeks and the course change in Week 3 I was finally free to uncover and enjoy my story. With the initial outline discarded, the book's title and Baty's elaboration on it turned out to be prophetic for me: Plot really did happen once I had well-defined characters in place. And more than once, characters happened once I had a plot in place in a benign feedback loop.
I did have to skip large parts of the middle in order to get to The End, partly because of space and time constraints and also because I realized I needed to do more research for the unexpected terrain I had wandered into. That was fine, though. I could do the reasearch and fill in the missing parts, but in the meantime I wanted to reach the end of the first draft.
I got past 100K words and to "the end" on July 28. I wondered if I should be filling in some more stuff in the middle, but I was exhausted at this point and sort of sick of the project, as much joy as I had gotten in the writing. I guess I really am very goal-oriented, for better and for worse: I can work like hell toward a firm goal, but tend to drift without something to work toward. Learning about my work process, in a way, was just as valuable than writing my first draft down.
Conclusion
In the end it seems to me the point isn't to write 50,000 words, or 100,000 or whatever other word goal, but to use the word-count goal to defeat the enemy.
The enemy has many names. Chris Baty called it the Inner Editor, Julia Cameron called it the internal censor in The Artist's Way, Steven Pressfield called it Resistance in The War of Art, as did Peter Elbow without the capitalization or the anthropomorphization in Writing With Power. Perhaps most colorfully Natalie Goldberg evidently called it the "monkey mind" in Writing Down the Bones, though I have yet to read that work. No doubt there are many others.
Whatever you call it, this force is the thing that keeps creativity down. It tells you that you're not good enough, that this is a foolish endeavor, why are you wasting time with this, and by the way, the dishes need washing. You can't possibly create with dirty dishes in the sink, can you?
The prescriptions for battling this enemy are as varied as the names given to it, but they basically boil down to tackling the creative block (Cameron) or just sitting down and doing the work no matter what (Pressfield). Baty's prescription through NaNoWriMo falls into the latter camp, but with the additional feature of distracting yourself from the Inner Editor with a time pressure. I experienced this firsthand through Camp NaNo. I found my Inner Editor triggered more than once by what I was writing, but then remembered my word count goal and plowed on. Who cared if it wasn't good? I still had 2,000 more words to write that day!
So I didn't write a masterpiece in one month, nor did I expect to. What I had was a subpar first draft, but a draft nonetheless. Something that showed me all the promises and flaws in my ideas and planning, something I could work with. It was just as bad as my Inner Editor said it would be, but I still had this icky, half-formed thing in my hands that wasn't pretty, but certainly was a start. It was so much more than I would have had if I hadn't set this goal and worked against my fears and doubts to achieve it.
I had read No Plot long before July, but there was one section I had bookmarked and passed by: the letter to people who had finished NaNoWriMo. With the month behind me I finally felt free to read it and to finish the book in truth. What's in the letter? Let's just say Chris Baty told me I rock, and he's right. You rock, too, if you've had the guts to set yourself a goal and strive for it.
I believe the true meaning of No Plot, and of timed writing challenges, comes down to this: Discipline, determination, and dedication are how we fight the clinging mud of our doubts and reach for our dreams. That is how we do our true work and make contributions that only we can make. If writing 50,000 words in a month is the way to do that, awesome. If writing every day at a more sedate pace is how to make it happen, awesome. The victory is not against a rival or a deadline or a word count, but against the resistance to creation--which, when you look long and hard at it, is in truth yourself.
Also, did I mention I won?
Dreamwidth entry URL: http://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/52487.html
write_away's writing advice book rec thread. It's by National Novel-Writing Month founder Chris Baty, and purports to be a road map to the process of writing a 50,000-word draft of a novel in one calendar month.
The book did at least one thing right for me as a reader: It got me excited about the idea of drafting a novel in a month and I decided to dive in with my own long-dreamed-of novel. I also decided to put off the review of the book until after I had tried the challenge so that I would have a handle on the subject matter. That chance came when I entered the July Novel Writing Month and Camp NaNoWriMo challenges. The following is my recounting of my NaNo experience along with the review of No Plot? No Problem! week-by-week, following the organization of the book.
Week -1: Revving Up
Mood: Excited
I went to the JulNoWriMo site first mainly based on a misunderstanding that I'm embarrassed to admit: I thought Camp meant a physical camp, which was right out because I don't live in the States and had to work. Yes yes, laugh all you like. I eventually joined the Camp NaNo site as well after realizing my mistake.
Still, I got one awesome thing out of JulNo: Their spreadsheet, which tracks not only the daily word count but also hours spent writing, plus morale. Keeping track of writing time is a habit I plan to take with me for the long term, thanks to JulNo. Morale, not so much: not only is it hard to sum up my mood for an entire day into a number, but it's also irrelevant. It doesn't matter how good or bad I feel when it comes to doing work. (Says the woman who did a week of Jack Squat during the month, but more on that later.)
The Camp NaNo site has the option for authors to form up into private groups called "cabins," and I joined one composed of fantasy/historical writers. Luckily mine was an active and dedicated one, though about half the writers fell away by the end. I also didn't get as much writing talk in the cabin as I'd expected, since chatter mainly centered around word counts, and in one case a personal disaster when a cabin mate's progress melted away in a disk failure.
My main community experience for this month came through the
go_nano community, which began as a place for write_away members doing Camp. Throughout the month co-admin Téa (
graychalk) and I did daily check-in posts where members could chime in with their word counts, triumphs, trials, and tribulations. I think the sense of being in this thing together helped me and the others tremendously.
In addition to my spreadsheet, cabin, and comm, I spent the final week before July on some last-minute research and outlining. I wrote some 8,000 words just setting up characters and outlining scenes, using a system set down by John Truby in The Anatomy of Story. I would end up throwing away pretty much all of this prep material, as discussed later. Still, going into Week 1 I had my scene index cards laid nicely out in Scrivener ready to be filled in. I thought I knew how my story was supposed to go and what deeper meaning it conveyed. I thought, in short, I was ready.
Week 1: Pedal to the Metal
Mood: Exuberant?
The first week was just as Baty had promised--easy, breezy. Carried on a strong wind, I was writing faster and more easily than I ever had on my life.
It was also going more quickly than I had been led to believe. The challenge was to write 50,000 in a month, but I had 40,492 by Day 7. This was partly driven by rivalry with a cabin-mate and by the sheer brag value on the go_nano community where I was making daily posts. It probably helped that I had read No Plot and knew about the philosophy of "exuberant imperfection," basically producing without censoring or editing by making quantity, not quality, the name of the game. I had also done a lot of freewriting, having read a book about it (Accidental Genius by Mark Levy) and done it regularly, especially after taking up the Artist's Way creativity course by Julia Cameron. Also I have a good base typing speed, 83 wpm on Dvorak according to an online test I took.
Due to all these different factors my writing flew along, though it was evident that I was writing a lot of crap. After reading No PlotI had resigned myself to that, but more seriously it was getting clearer that I was going in the wrong direction fast. The plan I had lovingly laid out the week before resulted in an incoherent mess in practice. I could go back after the month was over to edit and make things better, of course, but a polished turd is still a turd. I kept grimly on with these thoughts, even if the exuberant imperfection was feeling decidedly lighter on exuberance and heavier on imperfection.
Week 2: A Resounding Crash
Mood: Stuck
Thus I careened into Week 2, which Baty had warned would be the hardest week. Since I was on such a roll already I decided this would be my week to meet the 50K goal. I had a major work event on July 10 and a weekend trip scheduled afterward. Besides, I hated what I was writing so much I just wanted to stop, one way or the other. Since I had bet my husband that I would eat dog meat (literally) if I didn't meet my goal, quitting wasn't an option and it would have been ridiculous to stop with only 7,000 words left. It helped that another cabin member was very close to the goal as well and we were in a race to get there first.
I reached 50,080 words on July 9. From July 10 to July 13 I didn't write another word. Part of it was the work event on July 10 and the weekend getaway from July 12 to 13. Partly I was burned out after writing so much in such a short time. Mostly, though, I was feeling uncertain and indecisive. I had my 50K words, but I knew they were the wrong words in the wrong direction. Worse, I didn't know what the right words and the right direction looked like. I had over half the month left, but couldn't decide whether to go on or stop there.
Téa, my co-admin in the go_nano community, encouraged me to find a new direction for my story, and on my weekend trip with my husband I finally found it. I discussed my troubles with him, leading to the following exchange:
Hubs: Why not make the love interest the bad guy?
Me: No no, that's so cliché.
Hubs: So what? Sometimes it pays to be obvious.
Me: Well... I guess if I did that, I'd have a clear central conflict... and he doesn't have to be a mustache-twirling bad guy, but someone with compelling reasons to do what he- wow, that actually works!
Hubs: Of course it does, I came up with it.
My lifemate's unbecoming lack of modesty aside, I realized this was the direction the story needed to go. It changed everything, meaning my 8,000 words of preparation, not to mention my 50,000 words written thus far, would go out the window. That was a sacrifice I was happy to make, though. It helped that my Camp NaNo words had been written in haste and without much in the way of craftsmanship. As Téa later pointed out, I would have had a far harder time giving those words up if I had spent more time and effort wandering down dead ends.
So I ended up experiencing the second-week slump Baty mentioned, despite meeting my initial word goal. After this new direction was in place, I was cautiously optimistic going into the third week.
Week 3: Fits and Starts
Mood: Smug
I knocked out 2,419 words the day after I got back from my trip. I didn't bother with a new outline this time, and for perspective it should be noted I outline everything, even little 1,000-word stories. For one thing I was in much too big a hurry to pound the words out, and for another I really didn't know where I was going. I wrote in irregular spurts, going as low as 330 words a day at one point. Eventually I set myself the goal of writing another 50,000 words before the end of the month and was motivated to write thousands of words a day again.
Chris Baty describes Week 3 as a euphoric time, and I guess it was that way for me, too. Mostly I was relieved that I had a story I could believe in after 50,000 words of trial-and-error. My words-per-hour rate fell from my first-week highs, but I was enjoying the product more and hummed along into Week 4.
Week 4: To the Finish Line
Mood: Determined
There was no more serious drama after that, at least as far as real life went. The characters on the page, on the other hand, went through the wringer, pushed to deeds they never thought themselves capable of, changing their relationships and lives irrevocably through their choices, going to their limits and beyond for what they believed in. I cried for what they were going through, thrilled at their feats, berated them for their mistakes, and laughed out loud at their moments of levity.
After the anguish of the first two weeks and the course change in Week 3 I was finally free to uncover and enjoy my story. With the initial outline discarded, the book's title and Baty's elaboration on it turned out to be prophetic for me: Plot really did happen once I had well-defined characters in place. And more than once, characters happened once I had a plot in place in a benign feedback loop.
I did have to skip large parts of the middle in order to get to The End, partly because of space and time constraints and also because I realized I needed to do more research for the unexpected terrain I had wandered into. That was fine, though. I could do the reasearch and fill in the missing parts, but in the meantime I wanted to reach the end of the first draft.
I got past 100K words and to "the end" on July 28. I wondered if I should be filling in some more stuff in the middle, but I was exhausted at this point and sort of sick of the project, as much joy as I had gotten in the writing. I guess I really am very goal-oriented, for better and for worse: I can work like hell toward a firm goal, but tend to drift without something to work toward. Learning about my work process, in a way, was just as valuable than writing my first draft down.
Conclusion
In the end it seems to me the point isn't to write 50,000 words, or 100,000 or whatever other word goal, but to use the word-count goal to defeat the enemy.
The enemy has many names. Chris Baty called it the Inner Editor, Julia Cameron called it the internal censor in The Artist's Way, Steven Pressfield called it Resistance in The War of Art, as did Peter Elbow without the capitalization or the anthropomorphization in Writing With Power. Perhaps most colorfully Natalie Goldberg evidently called it the "monkey mind" in Writing Down the Bones, though I have yet to read that work. No doubt there are many others.
Whatever you call it, this force is the thing that keeps creativity down. It tells you that you're not good enough, that this is a foolish endeavor, why are you wasting time with this, and by the way, the dishes need washing. You can't possibly create with dirty dishes in the sink, can you?
The prescriptions for battling this enemy are as varied as the names given to it, but they basically boil down to tackling the creative block (Cameron) or just sitting down and doing the work no matter what (Pressfield). Baty's prescription through NaNoWriMo falls into the latter camp, but with the additional feature of distracting yourself from the Inner Editor with a time pressure. I experienced this firsthand through Camp NaNo. I found my Inner Editor triggered more than once by what I was writing, but then remembered my word count goal and plowed on. Who cared if it wasn't good? I still had 2,000 more words to write that day!
So I didn't write a masterpiece in one month, nor did I expect to. What I had was a subpar first draft, but a draft nonetheless. Something that showed me all the promises and flaws in my ideas and planning, something I could work with. It was just as bad as my Inner Editor said it would be, but I still had this icky, half-formed thing in my hands that wasn't pretty, but certainly was a start. It was so much more than I would have had if I hadn't set this goal and worked against my fears and doubts to achieve it.
I had read No Plot long before July, but there was one section I had bookmarked and passed by: the letter to people who had finished NaNoWriMo. With the month behind me I finally felt free to read it and to finish the book in truth. What's in the letter? Let's just say Chris Baty told me I rock, and he's right. You rock, too, if you've had the guts to set yourself a goal and strive for it.
I believe the true meaning of No Plot, and of timed writing challenges, comes down to this: Discipline, determination, and dedication are how we fight the clinging mud of our doubts and reach for our dreams. That is how we do our true work and make contributions that only we can make. If writing 50,000 words in a month is the way to do that, awesome. If writing every day at a more sedate pace is how to make it happen, awesome. The victory is not against a rival or a deadline or a word count, but against the resistance to creation--which, when you look long and hard at it, is in truth yourself.
Also, did I mention I won?
Dreamwidth entry URL: http://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/52487.html