By the numbers
NaNoWriMo 2023 is OVER! On the afternoon of November 30th, 2023, I crossed the 50,000-word line to complete the writing challenge. Yay me!
50,000 words in 30 days requires an average of 1,667 words per day. I…averaged that much. My daily word count totals were all over the place. Some days, life intrudes on writing. Such as Thanksgiving.
Writing 1,667 words per day is challenging, to be sure, but it’s below the 2,000 words per day of productive, professional authors such as Stephen King. Sorry. I’ll try harder.
What does 50,000 words mean? Publishers look for at least 60,000 words in a commercial fiction manuscript. Beyond that, it goes up by genre. Raether’s Enzyme is rather large for a thriller at 117,000 words. The Gray God is a healthy 85,000-word horror novel. For a new author’s adult science fiction or fantasy novel, 100,000 to 120,000 words is a good target range. For established authors, these rules are relaxed, as the author has an audience who trusts the author to make whatever word count worthwhile. Translating word count to page count is tricky. Format and typography play a big role. So, 50,000 words of Untitled Science Fiction Project is half, or less, of the final manuscript length. Or it would be if I hadn’t cheated.
Per my pre-NaNoWriMo post, I went into the challenge intending to finish my main character autobiographies and begin work on the story in screenplay format. This is what I did. Ha-ha! I cheated and I’m glad I did it! I regret nothing! At the end of the month, I had about 16,000 words of autobiography and 34,000 words of screenplay.
The bios will continue to inform how I write the characters. Portions of them may surface in the manuscript where appropriate.
What does 34,000 words of screenplay mean? In this case, the 34,000 words print out to about 158 pages. The film industry’s rule of thumb is that each page is about one minute of screen time. My incomplete Untitled Science Fiction Project screenplay is already over two and a half hours long. That’s the length of Dune (Part 1), which covers half of the 188,000-word novel. Yikes! A more charitable comparison might be the adaption of the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes (144,000 words). The story there plays out over fifteen 45-ish minute episodes (approximately 675 script pages). Not an entirely fair comparison, as the show brings in characters and events from later in the book series before it wraps up the Leviathan plot line. The point is that a long script may still fit into a reasonably sized science fiction novel. That’s what I’m telling myself.
Evolution is a process.
Seasoned authors have a process, if not a formula, for writing their novels. My process is still evolving. With more seasoning, it may converge on something I can prescribe. Like so much in this blog, what I’ll do here is describe. You may scratch your head, stroke your chin, or laugh your ass off. I’m not recommending you try this at home. I did, and time will tell if it worked.
So far, it never starts in the same place. Raether’s Enzyme started with wanting to tackle the themes of a previous superhero screenplay in a form that could be produced with a sensible budget. The Gray God began with a word picture of cultists worshiping a strange god in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Untitled Science Fiction Project was born of a desire to write a story whose movie trailer would have epic music. I want it to be big and fun.
For this project, I’m bringing together my favorite parts of prior processes and tossing in a few new ones.
| Raether’s Enzyme | The Gray God | USFP | |
| Incubation | Screenplay | NaNoWriMo | NaNoWriMo-ing a screenplay! |
| Drafting | Planning | Pantsing | Plantsing |
| Word Processor | Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word | Scrivener | Scrivener |
| Notebook | OneNote | Scrivener | Scrivener, Campfire |
| Workshopping | Helium Exchange (screenplay) | Scribophile | TBD. Maybe none. |
| Self-editing Tools | Word and Grammarly | Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit | TBD. Probably: Word, Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit |
I’ve decided I love working through the zeroth draft in screenplay format. I got much more of my story fleshed out during this NaNoWriMo than I did working on The Gray God in a previous NaNo. Bonus: It was easier to hit the word count goals. Once I get characters talking, the words just flow by the hundreds. These people just won’t shut up. In a screenplay, dialog can just be CHARACTER NAME followed by what they say.
QILIN taps his specs and casts a new holo that floats above the map. We see a herd of woolly mammoths grazing on the steppes. Snow-covered mountains rise in the background. The image crossfades to a similar scene at night. Now auroras shimmer and dance in the sky.
QILIN
Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!
SPHINX
Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.
QILIN
Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.
SPHINX
That’s how they went extinct the first time.
GRIF
There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?
No dialog tags (said, asked, whispered, etc.). Bits of action to frame the conversation. All those things will come in time, but here we’re trying to keep up with what’s being said. This does result in Tarantino-esque talking scenes that seem to go on forever. That’s okay because I’ll come back and trim things later. For NaNoWriMo, I wanted the words to flow. It was fun and I made progress in refining the characters’ voices.
Where do I go from here?
I plan to continue to work on the screenplay until the story is complete. It is much less expensive to rewrite or discard a screenplay scene than the equivalent scene in novel prose. The completed screenplay is something I can share with very intrepid early readers. This worked for Raether’s Enzyme. Two friends read the whole script in single sittings, and one of those was on the john. If the script can excite readers and pull them through the story, then you have reason to hope the novel will do the same.
For grins, I asked ChatGPT to adapt the scene fragment above into prose.
Qilin tapped his futuristic spectacles, initiating a holographic projection that materialized above the digital map. The hologram revealed a sprawling expanse of steppes, where a herd of woolly mammoths peacefully grazed. Majestic snow-covered mountains provided a stunning backdrop to the scene. The visual seamlessly transitioned to a nocturnal setting, with the same landscape bathed in the soft glow of auroras dancing across the sky.
Excitement bubbled within Qilin as he shared his discovery with the group, exclaiming, “Guys, they have woolly mammoths! In the south of Yo-tun-whatever. I want to go mammoth hunting!”
Sphinx, ever the voice of reason, countered Qilin’s enthusiasm, “Qi, they didn’t bring those animals back from extinction just so you could shoot them.”
Undeterred, Qilin proposed a compromise, “Okay, I’ll play fair. I’ll make my own spear.”
Sphinx, with a hint of sarcasm, responded, “That’s how they went extinct the first time.”
Attempting to restore order, Grif intervened, “There will be no hunting of megafauna until after we finish the mission. Understood? Can I get back to the briefing?”
Fear not, dear readers. I will be adapting Untitled Science Fiction Project by hand.
And I’ll let you go early. This post is only 1,267 words long.
