This past month in November, I participated in NaNoWriMo.Now I had heard about NaNoWriMo before (and for those of you that don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month). In November, everybody gets together and participates in "30 days of literary abandon". People sign up and right at 12 am on November 1st, they can start writing. The goal is to reach 50,000 words in 30 days, or approximately 1667 words every day.
I knew about NaNoWriMo in the past but being in school (and November being the month before finals), this was a difficult project to take on with limited time. Since I'm now working full time, I thought it might be a challenge but I would at least have more time than my days back in University.
I have always been a big writer -- short stories and poems are my favorite mediums but I thought writing a novel might be a challenge. I'm oversimplifying but I felt that it would be like writing several short stories in a serial fashion.
As you may have guessed, I did reach my 50k goal by the end of the month. Thirty days of literary abandon just like they said and you know what, I learned a few things too about participating in NaNoWriMo and really, about how it might affect my productivity.
- Daily goals make things manageable
- Catching up is difficult.
- Having a buffer gives you flexibility
1. Daily goals make things manageable
Right from the start, I already knew which approach I would take to reach my 50,000 word goal by the end of the month.
From reading many of the e-mails that NaNoWriMo sent me, there were two kinds of people participating: tortoises and hares (my own analogy). Tortoises took things slow and steady. Sometimes, they reached the daily word count, other times they would go over and still others would be a little behind but try to write something every day. Hares, on the other hand, would spring as quickly as possible to the finish line (the 50k word goal) then take a break, madly spring again, take a break, and rinse and repeat. As I browsed through the site, NaNoWriMo users have word counts beside their profile names and I saw that a lot of them already had 30,000 - 40,000 words by the end of the week. To me, that was insane!
I think you can guess by now which approach I decided to take. I'm actually fairly lucky that November 1st was on a Sunday and that I had a decent idea to write about already brewing in my mind. I managed to not only get to the goal of my daily word count of 1667 words, I managed to create a one day buffer on the first day as well!
Depending on how fast you type, you may be devoting half an hour to an hour a day contributing to your novel. My average seemed to be about an hour and a half and let me tell you, it was so difficult to sit down and just write. For the first 2 weeks, I seemed to know where things were moving along and things moving along swimmingly. There were certainly times where I faltered and had writer's block but I managed to segue into some random segments and achieve my daily goals any way.
At the end of each writing session, I felt extremely happy to post my word count to NaNoWriMo and watch as others increased their word counts each day. Back in University, I started out cramming quite a bit for exams and really not doing that badly on the finals. This was not a superior use of my time though and although it did help that I was studying fields of science where concepts built on top of one another (and therefore, not understanding one topic will hold back your understanding of the next concept), things were almost always easier (and less stressful) when I did a small amount of studying or work every single day as opposed to cramming it all into one session.
It was the same thing here. I would never have enough ideas (or energy) to write a blast of words like other people. It also made it easier that I wouldn't be taking long breaks from my writing, so I wouldn't have to read back on what I've written before in order to continue.
2. Catching up is difficult
Around week 3, I had writer's block almost every day. It was such a crucial point in the story as well because I was trying to build towards the climax at that point but didn't have any good ideas as to where I should go. I knew how it started, I also knew how I wanted to end up, but I didn't have a good idea of the big problem and the resolution. You may think it weird for someone to write without knowing all these things beforehand, but NaNoWriMo encourages writers to write - whether or not they had something to say is different. At some point in your writing though, you do find a plot and that's what eventually happened to me.
In week 4, I had several commitments outside of work that took up my time and my time started inching into sleep as I struggled to set out some time for all my responsibilities. I think around day 23 or 24, I slipped - I wrote a few hundred words and then had massive writer's block combined with a late night.
Things didn't go well there and although it never crossed my mind that I wouldn't reach that 50k goal, I did think that I would have to stay up on the weekend to catch up or ultimately finish the novel.
Why was catching up so difficult? Hey, reaching the daily word count was difficult enough. Trying to reach 2 or 3 daily word counts so that you've 'caught up' was not fun at all if you're experiencing writer's block. This is a big reason why creating and reaching daily goals was incredibly helpful to my sanity.
3. Having a buffer gives you flexibility
On day 1, I immediately jumped ahead in the word count having an extra day's worth of 'words' in my word count. When I started writing, I was filled with the excitement of writing and wasn't really thinking about reaching a certain word count or anything like that - rather, I was interested in just writing and seeing where it would take me.
The whole time I was writing, I never thought about not writing on any one day because I would then lose the buffer I had maintained so painstakingly. It was partly because of the daily word count that I wanted to hit every day, but it was also the fact that I did NOT want to lose the buffer I had built up.
In any case, around week 4, I did sleep as I mentioned before but with a buffer, I managed to not lag behind too much. I was slightly worried though during week 4 because although I thought I was right on track (after missing one day), I looked at my word count and calculated where I should actually be and panicked that I was a day behind.
Suffice to say, I was very lucky that the last days of November was the weekend and I caught up easily.
If you've read this far, I commend you for reading stuff that is probably pretty obvious to you already. What you may find interesting (more interesting hopefully) is that I'm going to try to apply these to everything I'm trying to learn.
My next goal is to learn Japanese. I could tell you about the multitude of differences between learning a language and trying to write a novel but I'm going to tackle it the same way:
1. Have a daily goal to reach
Whether its learning a few vocabulary words every day or learning how to count to 20 (which I've done through an interesting youtube video), I should try my best to learn at least one thing every day. And by learn, I don't mean read over once, repeat it a few times and then leave it. I mean actually learn so that I can recall it in a few weeks.
2. Catching up - just don't do it
Never fall behind. One of the best pieces of advice I received from my biology professor back in University was to make use of all the time you have. Say you're waiting for the bus for 10 minutes every day - USE those 10 minutes to learn one word. Are you walking to work every day? Listen to a japanese audio pod cast!
3. Having a buffer gives you flexibility
This is much less important for learning a language since you won't necessarily have a deadline, but if you do and you have extra time - why not go ahead and learn a few more words?
Lastly, I am posting an excerpt of my novel below. If you're interested in reading the full novel (I'm warning you in advance, its long) send me an e-mail.
He dreamt that he was in a library. There were shelves upon shelves of books; he tried hard to read the titles of the books on the shelves but like all dreams, he could only make out blurs. He saw himself walking through rows upon rows of books with heavy footsteps.
He thought maybe if he picked up a book on the shelf and opened it, he would be able to make sense of it all. He went to a random book on the shelf near a wall and opened it. Blurs inside as well. All he could make out was red and blue on the covers and pictures that looked like they had the wind filter applied several times in photoshop in multiple directions. Dissatisfied that he could not read the wealth of knowledge in his subconscious, he put the book back on the shelf and started to walk away when he noticed that the book did not quite fit so snugly in the shelves. The book jutted out a little and being inside a library, albeit inside his subconscious, he felt compelled to put the book back into its place on the shelf.
He gave a slight nudge to the book but was surprised to find that it did not move an inch. He looked around incredulously but being inside his own dream, there was no one to look surprised at to. He pushed a little harder but again, was surprised that it did not move. The book being misaligned with the rows upon rows of books was starting to annoy him now. Finally, mustering an incredible amount of strength and willpower, he punched the book with all his might. The book aligned itself with the other books but as it did so, he heard a click and then a small churn of a motor behind the wall. That was strange, he did not expect to hear a motor in the library and especially not in his dreams. He stepped back to see that a nearby wall was now misaligned with the other walls, just like the book that had annoyed him before. Again, he tried to push the wall back in, but as the motor continued to churn, the wall slid to the side, revealing a secret passageway.
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