No, no, the cat hasn’t been partying on the keyboard. There is no cat. NaNoWriMo is the friendly abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. It isn’t so much a contest as a creative writing challenge. Can you write 50,000 words of new fiction in 30 days? That’s an average of 1667 words per day, each and every day. For reference, paperbacks run 300-350 words per page and the larger 6”x9” trade paperbacks are about 350-400. Four or five pages in a book you’d read. If you do the math, 50,000 words is a very slim novel. These days, novels with only 60,000 words are on the slender end. 120,000 words is considered bulky for a first-time author. Established authors can publish as many words as they want. For better and worse. If you reach the NaNoWriMo goal, you’re probably more than half-way through an initial draft. Yay!

PoMo is usually an abbreviation for postmodern. Here I’m saying it is short for postmortem. This is cheating in service of a bouncy blog post title. The corner of the software industry that I used to inhabit used this term to describe analysis and discussion after a project’s completion that focused on questions like: “What went well? What went wrong? What can we do better going forward?” Participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time provided a great opportunity asking such questions.

Pantsing Not Optional

And whose fault it that? Mine. I dithered about doing NaNoWriMo as Summer gave way to Autumn. I lied to myself about resolving the question during my October road trip. As November loomed, I had a story idea, a setting, a few characters, a couple of scenes, a couple of monsters, and the hint of a theme. I also had months of not-writing on my conscience. I needed to shake the funk of Raether’s Enzyme’s submission/rejection cycle.

This meant taking a trusting, desperate leap into Chapter 1 with no story outline and only a vague sense of the ending. This was at odds with my engineering mindset. I am a planner, a plotter. I want to hold the architecture and structure in my mind and work towards a design. For this project, I would be flying by the seat of my pants. In NaNoWriMo parlance, I was about to become a pantser.

On the Precipice

In the last week of October, I set up my NaNoWriMo profile under the alias Scriblius (contains spoilers for this metastory). The site encourages participants to supply book cover images for their novels. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know I have an enthusiasm for dev art that is coupled with a serious deficit of artistic talent. I combined some dubious Microsoft Word WordArt with a crude approximation of one of my monsters. The result was art only a developer could love. To be honest, I did not. But here it is.

So wrong.

Scrivenering Things Up

As part of the whole experimental/improvisational thing, I decided that The Gray God would be my first attempt to use Scrivener. Scrivener is a creative writing tool that fills the role of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in the software world. It combines a word processor with tools to organize, reorganize, annotate, research, and format projects ranging from articles to screenplays, short stories, and novels. It doesn’t impose a workflow. Its outliner is useful for planners. Its ability to shuffle sections and scenes around is a boon to pantsers.

Into the Breach

The plan, or perhaps intent is a better word, was to write 2,000 words per day for a long as possible. For the first week, I did just that. If I had kept that up, I’d finish on the 25th, or have a chance to be properly human for a few days that month.

To reach that goal, I had to set aside editing as I went. I stopped stopping to correct and improve the text. Mostly. I just let it flow. If a sentence ran on or a scene was unnecessary, I kept it for the sake of the word count. This felt dirty. It felt like cheating. If I slowed down, I’d bail out of the scene and move on, sometimes jumping to some unknown point in the story and filing the material in the Chapter Pending folder in my Scrivener project. It was disorganized. It was naughty. It was fun. The results are…rough…to put it politely. To see what I mean, check out the excerpt I posted  to NaNoWriMo from Day One’s writing. Yeah…it needs work. Lots of work.

The Joys of Pantsing

Pantsing offers the thrill of discovery. I started with what I intended to be the prologue. Two young men, Pete and Scott, are heading off into the deep woods with a nefarious purpose. Pete will cook meth while Scott collects edible mushrooms. At the end of the weekend, they’ll come back from “mushroom hunting” with no one suspecting they were breaking bad. Something supernaturally terrible happens to Scott. The original idea was that our main character would meet Pete later in the story and they’d reluctantly work together to survive our horror story. What I discovered was that Pete and Scott were younger than I expected. They were the same age as the main character in the story. I discovered that Pete was the main character and that Scott’s disappearance is what drives him towards confronting Lovecraftian horror.  

This meant that my prolog needed to be the first act. Wow. It also revealed the template the evil cult used to select its victims. These kids were all at-risk youth, like Pete. I might well have sorted this out during planning. We’ll never know.

The Perils of Pantsing

Letting things flow and discovering the characters and the narrative voice on the fly is all well and good, but it does entail risk. The Gray God was intended to be straight-up Young Adult (YA) fiction. Pete and Scott are contemporary adolescent males who drop F-bombs with coarse frequency. Don’t get me started on their insidious Uncle Jack, who was another discovery in this early writing. That’s uncool for the audience of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. Can you imagine J. K. Rowling allowing Ron Weasley to curse like a soldier? “Bloody Hell” has a certain weight of profanity to it, but it’s still PG-13. Harsher language is alluded to while Rowling uses her fantastic setting to substitute more wizardly oaths for common profanity.

So, pending significant adjustments to tone and language, pantsing blew my marketing plan to smithereens.

The Terrible Two

NaNoWriMo encourages its writers to update their word counts daily. Combine that raw data with anecdotes from its vibrant user community and a pattern emerges where the second week is when things get more difficult. The initial adrenaline is spent. Mistakes made in the opening rush have been accumulating, threatening the narrative integrity of what follows. If you’re pantsing, the number of directions the story could go is rising with the square of the number of central characters.

As I reached the end of the second week, I had most of the unexpected first act down. In a desperate bid to escape the aftermath of Scott’s disappearance, Pete unwittingly crossed over into a realm of eldritch horror. I had scattered scenes ahead of him, but the threshold he crossed was a major reset to the thriller/mystery balance. I struggled for word-count. This was bad.

How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo

Short version: Write backstory for your characters.

Long version: I was stuck going forward, so I went back. Pete’s uncles, Jack and Dan, had a history of violence that informs Pete’s actions in The Gray God. I hadn’t worked out many of the details, but I did have a few of lines of dialog from different scenes:

Uncle Jack (threatening Pete): “It’s another sort of sin to make your mama cry. One I am ashamed to bear. Don’t make your mama cry, Peter.”

Leah (Pete’s mother): “Don’t even think about it. I’m sure Jack told you stories about what Dan was like before he met Aunt Jan, but you haven’t seen him in a fight. It’s scary as s**t, Peter. Look, I know he did some bad things to Scott, but the counseling really did help. If he lost control again…”

Pete (to his new friend, Joseph): “My uncle says I should kick the guy in the nuts and punch him the throat. Then, I guess your mom hasn’t done time for aggravated assault.”

I logged 3,888 words over two days with a short story that ties these lines together. Writing The Steve Incident taught me about the dynamics of Pete’s family.

Breakfast of the NaNoRhinos

NaNoWriMo is an event that brings a vast and far-flung community of aspiring novelists and self-publishing authors together for a frenzy of artistic creativity that is bigger and longer than Burning Man, if not as flamboyant. The website buzzes with updated word counts and discussions in its various forums. Out in the real world, volunteers organize meet-ups and write-ins where participants can share the joy and pain of the thing. They work hard to make NaNoWriMo both fun and a catalyst for ongoing writing community.

My home region for NaNoWriMo is the Snoqualmie Valley. Our Municipal Liaisons put together a full calendar of events and entertainments. Lacking a laptop to take my work on the road and being overwhelmed by the self-imposed workload*, I missed most of these events. I did make it to the Traveler’s Breakfast Meet-up at the Fall City Roadhouse. It was a good time with friendly, interesting folks. The slice of the valley’s sixty-nine writers were busy with projects generally fantastical in genre and varying in tone from horror to whimsical mystery. I enjoyed the company and the eggs Benedict. If you decide to NaNoWriMo, avail yourself of the community events set up by your local volunteers.

Dreams and Horrors

As you may recall, before the pleasant interlude with NaNoRhinos, I was getting stuck as to how Pete’s journey into horror and madness should proceed. While I struggled to sort that out, there was work I could attend to. The Gray God is a story of Lovecraftian horror. It needed more horror. There were characters that my planner side knew were doomed. I set to writing scenes describing their ghastly fates. When these events occurred wasn’t set yet, but the power of Scrivener allowed me to park those chunks of text in Chapter Pending for safekeeping.

Another important aspect of the Lovecraftian fiction is dreams. Great Cthulhu torments sensitive minds and incites his followers with dreams of monstrous alien cities and worlds afire with chaos and death. Dreams reveal the Doom that came to Sarnath. Dreams in the Witch House transport poor Walter Gilman to frightful dimensions and ensnare him in hideous rites.

Many writers (and not a few readers) will roll their eyes at the prospect of a dream sequence.  And, yes, they can be abused to shoehorn in exposition and/or heavy-handed symbolism. In Lovecraft’s work, dreams are frequently either an experience of an alternate dimension or something the character uses to rationalize a horrible experience. It was only a dream. It had to be a dream. I chose to break from the subgenre in this regard and give the dreams in The Gray God the realism of weirdness. The characters in question have reasons to suspect something is very wrong, but what is wrong is beyond their reasoning minds’ abitility to accept. It’s up to their subconscious minds to raise the alarm. The dreams are short and very oblique. The alarm is raised but the danger is not revealed. To get the surrealism and disjointedness I was looking for, I wrote backwards from the ending event or realization that snaps the character awake. There’s a flow to it, but it’s not normal. I think it works. Some day soon, you’ll have a chance to judge for yourself.

How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo – Part 2

Entering the home stretch, I was pantsed-out. Dreams and horrors were duly recorded. Numerous scenes between the heroes and villains made the characters and conflicts clear, even if the plot wasn’t. I was still thousands of words short of the goal line and I didn’t have another short story dangling before me.

What I did have was memories of fast and fluid work in the screenplay format. Descriptions are lean. Grammar is relaxed. The format itself decides how and when to interleave action and dialog. If you want to fly through a story, write it as a screenplay. Scrivener is happy to help with that. You can drop into screenplay format for any scene and it will attend to the format and auto-complete your character names.

To make things fun, I sat the villains around the dinner table and had them talk freely. This was inspired by the Villain Pub series on YouTube. They are in a safe place where everybody knows their name. They discuss what they each plan to do once their evil scheme succeeds. They argue with one another. I learned more about them. Perhaps I can salvage some of the better lines for the main story.

To balance this out, and cheat a little less, I also screenplay-sketched a scene that I did want for the main story where the heroes are gathered for a brief respite. It’s cold and wet, but Joseph brought some beer and Amber has a joint to share. Kids around a campfire. What fun! Why on earth would you think it’s the last time any of them will be happy? Oh, it’s a horror story. Yeah. Sorry, kids…

Always Cheat. Always Win.

I kept the campfire scene going until Scrivener and the NaNoWriMo word-counter agreed that I was over the finish line. Scrivener says 50,347. NaNoWriMo credits me with 50,087. I won! Yay!

PoMo Take-aways

Things I learned in my first NaNoWriMo

  • Pantsing can be great fun. It offers exciting opportunities for serendipitous discovery.
  • Pantsing allows the story to go where it wants to.
  • Allowing the story to go where it wants may not get you to where you want and need to be.
  • I would prefer to have an outline or other roadmap of the characters, conflicts, and story beats before diving into Chapter 1.
  • I enjoy talking with folks about stories and storytelling. Maybe even enough to join a writing group.
  • Scrivener is a solid tool for the early phases of creative writing. I will continue with it at least through the first drafts of The Gray God.

Thanks for reading this far.

* 2,000 words per day is an ambitious goal, but not an outrageous one. Professional authors range from 500 to 10,000, with prolific and skillful Stephen King right at 2,000. King also writes every day of the year except his birthday and Christmas, if you were wondering. And he doesn’t stop after one month to play Red Dead Redemption 2, catch up with his Netflix, and travel to see his family. Unlike some aspiring authors I could mention.

For reference: Word says this post is 2,522 words long.