Happy Thursday, friends,
This week, I hit 11,500 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, which kind of blows my mind because even though I write nonfiction at this speed all the time, and I’ve written fiction fast, I’ve never written fiction this fast and have it be this good. By which I mean ready to be seen by my agent or editor.
The trick, ironically, is that I went easy on myself this time—which is very unlike me. I decided I would start writing at 11pm each night and go until 1am and see what happens. My only condition was that I’ll write a clean draft. I write clean first drafts as a journalist, why wouldn’t I with fiction? There are so many novels that get written sloppily during NaNoWriMo and are eventually abandoned because the magic is gone and now it’s just a mess that no one wants to deal with.
So while I don’t recommend that you start editing and obsessing over every single word, you can’t be lazy in your storytelling. When I did NaNoWriMo in 2021 (and won), I kept putting off the decision-making and leaving difficult scenes for later. And when later came, there was no joy left in it at all.
If you write a sloppy first draft and then have to rewrite the whole thing again from scratch, what was the point?
I’m following a simple three-step process that I’ve used (and taught) before:
Step 1: Tell the story. I do this with a scene-by-scene outline with a couple of sentences to describe each scene.
Step 2: Have it make sense with a clean first draft. Inevitably, the outline changes as I go, but it still provides a solid structure, which means I generally know where I’m going.
Step 3: Make it pretty. This is editing and polishing.
I did the outline in October, so now I’m in Step 2.
And it’s in Step 2 that journalists and content writers have a real advantage. The years of journalism and writing to deadline have been more beneficial than I realized. I told our Slack community last week that I would now treat each scene in my book as an article, with an average scene being around 1,500 words.
Once it’s been researched and reported, I can write a 1,500-word article in 1-3 hours. So I know I can manage a scene in the same timeframe. 54 scenes in a book, 2 hours a day, finished in 54 days. Easy.
(Not really, because this is still not paying work, which means I’m doing this after hours when I’ve already worked a full day. Some days, it’s really haaaaard.)
If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, there will be a lot of discussion about “quality doesn’t matter.” It doesn’t have to, and if you’re a new writer or that’s just the way it works for you, go for it. There’s no one right way to do this. Just make sure you have the heart and the stubbornness to face the mess once NaNoWriMo is over and don’t do what many of us will do—which is to celebrate the 50,000-word achievement, and abandon the whole thing after.
Me, I’m a rebel. I don’t want to spend three months cleaning a draft. I hate re-doing work and I’m so easily bored, it’s (no joke) an actual problem. It’s why I love freelancing—I get to spend time in a topic, and then I get to move on to something else. I want to spend as much time as is needed in a scene (between 1-5 hours, typically), and then I want to move on to the next.
This way, when the draft is done, it’s really done. And I won’t lose confidence in my abilities when I produce drivel day after day for 30 days. I can’t speak for all writers, but I know that if I’m producing subpar work and that’s all I’m doing for a whole month, I don’t feel good about myself.
So that’s my process. I’ve let my book writing (and publishing) slide over the last few years, so I figure a solid writing habit and production schedule is the best way to dive back in.
Cheers,
Natasha