A bit more than a month ago I decided to give National Novel Writing Month a shot again. The goal: 50,000 words in one month. I had tried NaNoWriMo twice before. In 2009 my total word count was an amazing 1748. More words of fiction than I had ever coherently written, but only a bit above the daily average required to reach the total word count: 1667. In 2010 I tried again. I did better this time, beating my old record by writing a grand total of 1749 words. That’s right, exactly one word closer to the goal. Reading this, you may assume that I have had problems with completing goals. Looking back at my previous creative attempts and academic nonchievements, this was absolutely 100% most definitely true. Was.
Because it’s 2011 now, and NaNoWriMo is over, and my final word count for this year’s attempt is: 50,183
Yep, not only did I win this year, I did it with a few days to spare. And now I’m going to explain to you how I did it.
1. The Difference
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” – Not Albert Einstein
Now, I’m not going to claim that I’m not insane, but I did think it would be a good idea to try things differently this time around. Step 1: Get a support group. Nothing motivates me better than showing off to people, it’s the only reason I do, uhh… anything. So, I joined fellow NaNo’ers on a particular forum I’m not going to mention because I don’t want worlds colliding. I would say that posting my word count there (almost) every day and discussing my progress with other people really helped to keep me going. There is one thing that motivates me almost as good as bragging, though, and that’s shame. So I decided to post all my writing on a public Tumblr, letting everyone who would be interested know that I failed. I posted my progress on Twitter for extra attention/threat of shame.
Another change I made was not using an ordinary word processor. Distraction-free writing is very important to a hyperactive-procrastinating-oh-look-how-many-funny-pictures-and-videos-there-are-on-the-internet-and-also-look-how-many-unplayed-games-there-are-in-my-Steam-list kind of guy. So I started with Ommwriter, and boy did it help. A soothing background, soothing music, soothing typing noises, it was all very soothing indeed. Unfortunately it started acting up after a while, with the on-screen text lagging behind my keypresses by a microsecond. This may seems like nothing, but a microsecond lasts a lifetime when you have ideas bursting out of your brain, so I sought an alternative. I found one in WriteMonkey. It isn’t quite as polished as Ommwriter, but I set a soothing blue background and typey sounds, and replaced the music with Grooveshark’s Ambient radio station, and I was set. I could write without distraction… as long as I kept my fingers away from alt-tab…
So outside of software, how did I keep myself from being distracted too much? More software, of course, come on. For a bit more than a year now, I’ve been adhering to my own interpretation of the Pomodoro Technique, using a simple little app called Focus Booster to measure how much time I’m actually spending getting work done. I plan all Pomodoros in a little notebook, and check them off whenever I’ve completed one. Keeping to this routine has given me great results both for school and work, so applying this to the writing of a novel seemed like an obvious choice.
Oh yeah, I kind of had an outline for the story. Not a real outline, mind you, I didn’t even have any idea what the ending of the story would be until about a day before I finished it, but I did have a setting, a few characters, and an idea of what kind of tone I wanted. This helped, but I do find that making shit up as you go along is, well, fun.
And lastly, I made sure to use Dropbox to keep a cloud backup of my text. This didn’t really increase productivity, but it did save my ass a bunch of times. My computer is a piece of shit that sometimes has random Blue Screen of Death attacks, and getting one of those while you are saving your txt files leads to, guess what, a blank text file. I almost had heart attack when it happened the first time, as I was closing in on 25,000 words, but good ol’ Dropbox keeps older revisions, so I was saved.
I’m sure there were some internal psychological thingamajigs going on which also made a difference, but they wouldn’t have been reinforced if I hadn’t taken action to be better prepared.
2. Numbers
”I couldn’t think of a good quote for this section.” – Me
Here’s my progress chart from my NaNoWriMo profile:
As you can see, I kept a pretty steady pace with the benchmark in the first week, lagged behind a bit in week two, and then sat on my ass for most of the third week. I hadn’t given up, I was just very busy with school and such, and couldn’t find any proper time to write. But then I got over my slump, and used the last two weeks or so to gloriously sprint to the finish, completing the goal a few days before the end of the month. I’m not gonna waste time posting the daily numbers here, but you can find them on the top of every post on the Tumblr.
Speaking of the Tumblr, I made sure to add some Google Analytics to it to see if anyone actually read it. I linked to it on the forum I was active on, my Twitter, and my Facebook, but of course I didn’t expect much. Still, I’ll post the some of the totals of November here for posterity. I had 111 Unique Visitors and 368 pageviews. This is much, much higher than zero, so I am happy.
Lastly, I want to take a look at how many hours I actually spent writing. This is easy because I recorded all the Pomodoros. Keep in mind that some of these I spent outlining, and every now and then I wrote on paper in the train or while away from home. In total I have 110 Pomodors of recorded work, which averages out to roughly 55 hours of writing. Dividing my total word count by this number gives me about 912 words written per hour, which matches my observations. There were plenty of times where I was a writing machine, pumping out words like I was personally getting my ass slapped by Stephen King, but other times I just kind of stared at the screen and drooled.
3. Results
“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining …researching …talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” – E. L. Doctorow
On my Twitter profile I describe myself as a “pretend writer.” This is because I had never really written anything, but loved to come up with stories in my head. Sure, I have one shitty story I put on Fience Sciction, but it’s nothing I’m proud of, just something I wrote so that I could have something. NaNoWriMo, of course, exists exactly to help people get over this hump, to allow them to say “sure, it sucks, but I wrote a 50,000 word novel. Suck on that, dad!” Did I expect to win? I’m going to be honest here, yes I did. I’ve changed a lot since last year, and I took the challenge seriously this time. I can definitely say that actually writing has started to allow me to find my voice, my own way of writing and describing things. I haven’t yet reread what I wrote (more on that later), but I do feel that the last 10,000 words are a lot more elegant and well-written than the first 10,000. They certainly came out easier. The whole experience really slapped into my brain what I knew before but never acted upon. It’s exactly what that quote up there says. I can come up with worlds, ideas, characters, storylines, etc. all I want, but unless I’m actually going to write them down they won’t exist anywhere but in my head. There is no worse place for something to exist than in my head. I would know, I live there. So I’ve learned to just write, and in fact I already got some ideas for the next edition of NaNoWrimo, though if things work out I can pump that novel out even sooner. Or short stories, or whatever. I’m excited about my newly unleashed abilities, is basically what I’m trying to get across here.
All in all, this accomplishment symbolizes a turning point for me. I have conquered NaNoWriMo, I will soon finish my first game, I worked for money this past month (just a temp translation job, but enough to afford a nice holiday season), and most importantly, I am finally approaching the end to my academic career, making my mom proud and leaving me with a potential backup if this whole “make money on the internet somehow someway idk lol” plan doesn’t work out. This is important to me, because I’ve always been that guy who doesn’t really work hard enough or finishes his projects, but somehow still always lucked his way into reasonable success. Sure, being lucky is fun, but it’s not a reliable path to success, you know? And it made me spoiled as hell. Why try, when things always work out for you anyway? Well I want certainty, that’s why. And I have great, great plans for the future me, but I need to change this “shit just kinda falls into place” attitude to reach them. Changing this attitude has been hard, and believing that it can be done was even harder. But here I am, I have completed the First Challenge. To the rest, I say: Bring it on.
4. FutureJer
“If you don’t think about the future, you cannot have one.” – John Galsworthy
So I wrote myself a novel. Now what? Well it has always been my intention to become a self-published author. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that the old TwenCen concept of writing a manuscript, and then leaving the rest up to an agent and publisher who will compensate you as they see fit, will not work for me. We’re living in a time when being self-published is most certainly a viable option. This takes work, of course. I’m going to have to rewrite the whole thing so that it doesn’t look like it was hastily written in a month, edit it or get it edited, and do all the marketing, etc. That will all take time, and effort, but I’m willing to put those in to maintain control of my work. However, I think it’s a good idea not to touch the work for a while, to let it sit for at least a month, maybe longer, so that I can look at it with fresh eyes again. This is why I haven’t even read it yet, and why I’ve been trying my best to ignore all the possible improvements to it that have been popping up in my head for the past week.
So until I’m prepared to take a look at the work again, I’m going to have to keep myself busy with other things. School, of course. Finishing Outer Space Hot Rod. Finally getting some kind of WordPress theme production going. And most important, coming up with an interesting idea for a webcomic which I will write and my most talented sister will illustrate. I’ll probably be doing lots of other writing in between. Oh, and there’s also the matter of a BA Thesis that has to be done before the summer starts.
However, if you are still interested in reading the very first draft in what will (un)doubtedly become the first of many bestselling adventures of Thomas Thing and his friend, then please, by all means, check out Good Excuses.
Also I’m totally the first person to use the word “nonchievement.” Write it down.
