Once upon a time, I used to wake up at 4 a.m. on November 1st to start writing a novel for NaNoWriMo. It was exciting, but often cold. Well, this November 1st I woke at 4:30, thought about starting writing and figured, no, there’s no need. Went back to sleep until 6:30, at which point I had time to shower and get dressed and grab a cup of coffee and write a few lines before heading to the beach for sunrise. I did bring my notes to think about the short story I’m working on. Even came up with the last line as I approached the beach. Good start to a sane month of writing.
I used to use NaNoWriMo to write the first draft of a novel, or even two novels. It helped me produce a lot of words, and most of them were useful. But it was tough on my body because it’s easy to ignore posture and breaks when focused on writing. One year, I wrote 200,000 words, taking care of my wrists and standing frequently. That was five years ago and I still don’t find soft chairs comfortable because of what I did to my gluteus maximus. I vowed then that I’d be more sane in my writing, even in November.
It helps that the last several months I’ve been revising my Edinburgh series and am pretty sure that I’m stopping at four novels since I’ve told as many stories about performing improv in Scotland as I’m interested in writing. I’ve been working on all four of the novels in the series, so I don’t want to think about another novel, or another major topic. I’m writing short stories about the characters in these four novels, and essays about being almost nomads, and skits about digital inclusion. Since each book in the series takes place either over a couple of weeks, or in twenty-four hours, there’s a lot of time that I can cover with these characters without overlapping with the novels. It’s fun to flesh out the events that are mentioned in the novel, such as the three brothers who couldn’t go the first year because their mother was ill, or how a couple ended up in Scotland on what was to be their honeymoon trip, but they’re no longer engaged.
My goal is 2,000 words a day. I had thought about starting with a bang of 5,000 words on day one. I like to get started with a good push, but since I was at a beach with good weather, pushing could wait until I was back in Illinois with a high temperature of 35 degrees. That seems like a good time to write most of the day.
But, even then, I don’t think I’ll start at four in the morning. Those days are done and while I’m glad I did them, I don’t really miss them.
I do enjoy writing, including first drafts. It’s nice to have a scene take shape as I play with it. What if the char says this? Or maybe that happens? I used to write as I thought, but now I do more considering possibilities before I write.
I walked 28,000 steps on November 1st even while writing 3,000 words, which while it isn’t a record is more than I’ve done since the arthritis in my hip started giving me pain when I walked too much. It hasn’t hurt this week, and I’ve made over 20,000 steps the last three days. Nice to keep that up even with NaNoWriMo starting.
Not sure why I didn’t think of this years ago, but on November 3rd, I moved 3,000 words (the number of words that I had written outlining ideas before NaNo started) into another file so that I could take the total count for a scrivener file as my word count for the month. Well, I have an idea why I didn’t do that earlier since I usually work on a novel, and I go back and revi
se sections as I’m writing later stuff. It wouldn’t be so easy if some of the novel was in another file. Also, my outlines have in the past been more than 20,000 words long. This year I just had 3,000 words in a file since some of my ideas were written long-hand. To minimize the danger of losing them, I took snapshots of the pages and uploaded them to the cloud.
After a week of writing, I liked not feeling obligated to sit down at the computer and write a thousand words before breakfast, or before doing my Spanish lesson for the day, or writing in my gratitude journal. If I want to write first thing, I can, but it’s nice not to have to plunge in. It’s also very nice to be done earlier in the day. I’ve never been someone who writes much late at night, but I often tried to get a new scene started so the first thing in the morning writing was a little easier. Nice to be done for the day and not feel the urge to write a few hundred more words.
But I still feel the pressure to get the 2,000 words done, especially when I have other things to do. Then I keep checking my word count, finding that I’m close and writing until I hit the magic number.
The biggest change in doing NaNoWriMo sanely is that I have scheduled things in November. In years when my goal was at least 100,000 words, I’d avoid all but a few social occasions, preferring to focus on writing for a month. That made sense when we spent the whole winter in Illinois. We had time to see friends during other months. But we’re traveling a lot more these days, so seeing friends is a higher priority. Since I am seeing friends in November, I shouldn’t be surprised when Sunday breakfast with a walk means that I have only 200 words before lunch. No problem, except I have other friends coming over at 4:00. Still, I had hours to write 1800 words. And I really like the 200 I wrote before breakfast since it added depth to a character in a current novel. It bodes well for my after-NaNoWriMo goal of writing 200 words five times a week.
It’s strange, but I think it was easier when my goal was 5,000 or more words a day. Then I would write every spare moment I had, not worrying about the usefulness of the words. Even the first year I did NaNoWriMo, I didn’t worry about whether what I was writing was good enough. Of course, I had
experience with writing fast. After my third child was over a year old, I went for an overnight stay to the Indiana Dunes and wrote 10,000 words over the course of the weekend, writing a complete children’s novel that I had been thinking about for months, but not finding the time to write. So I knew that I could write fast and be caught up in the story. That weekend, I hardly talked to anyone other than ordering my dinner and saying hello to someone in the sauna who greeted me. For years, I talked about how wonderful that had been.
There’s something about throwing yourself wholeheartedly into a project that makes the time fly. But when the project is only one of many things you do during a day, it’s harder to get lost in it. Maybe it’s not really possible to do it sanely.
This may be the last year that I do NaNoWriMo since I’m confident that I can write the first draft of a novel on my own without the encouragement of lots of other people working on their novels. It’s been a fun run, but I might be done with it.