Some Actual Insights For Once (NaNo Follow-Up)

Photo by Molly Wilders on Unsplash

This year fell somewhere between the qualified success of 2018 and the unmitigated disaster of 2019. Actually, now that I'm doing the math, it's almost exactly between them. I hit about 75% of my 2018 goal (48 out of 50 pages), and about 25% of 2019 (13 out of 50). This year, I managed 20 out of 40, which is dead on 50%. It's also 4171 words, which feels like a decent accomplishment, at least in light of my word count goal for the year. 

What I'm discovering is that, for the kind of high volume drafting I'm going for in November, not having enough time to write is not, as such, a problem. The most I've gotten done for NaNo so far, in 2018, most of the actual fiction drafting I got done was in 15 second to 2 minute snippets while things were loading or printing at my Government Office Job. I also including written worldbuilding and other notes in my page count, and worked on that at my breaks. Even with the worldbuilding pages though, I'm still fairly sure that was the year I got the most actual fiction drafted during NaNo. When I have longer stretched of time to work, I have a tendency to start thinking about the implications of what I'm writing, whether it makes sense, where I'm supposed to go from there. This is not a bad thing - it produces cleaner, more coherent drafts, scenes that are more likely to more or less work as-is, and even in the order they started in. But writing sessions too short to start worrying about what I'm doing are better for the 'Eh, we'll fix it in post' high speed drafting that any version of NaNo requires. 

I haven't read anything that I can recall about these kinds of micro-sessions. I've heard of 5 minute sprints, but nothing shorter than that, so I might someways be going against conventional wisdom here. But the 'slowing down to think it through during long stretches of unstructured writing time' phenomenon is a Known Thing. I'm going to be experimenting more with short sprints going forward, to see if I can harness this in a more structured way. I feel like the uncertainty of writing while waiting for things, not knowing how long it is, just that it's short, may actually be part of what worked about that, so maybe I can find a timer with a little bit of randomness built in. 

I do need that time to plan and worldbuild and make decisions though. Like, it's important. Short sprints notwithstanding, I'm not really a pantser, and I need to know what I'm writing, what a given scene or chapter is trying to do, or I will stall out eventually. I'm not a perfectionist, but I have a hard time moving forward without a plan. When I do have a lot of open time to write, and I'm unable or disinclined to do sprints (the impact of which, as I said, I am still in the process of examining), that planning, whether it involves a little bit of outlining or conversation with a beta reader or writing partner to work through the next set of decisions I have to make, needs to have already happened for me to make good use of the time. Making arbitrary or semi-arbitrary decisions, the kind you need to make about a zillion of in the writing process, especially in the first act of a novel, when you're still setting everything up, introducing everyone, and, in speculative fiction, establishing the world, is inexplicably draining for me, and I'm godawful slow at it sometimes. I have to leave myself enough time to make those decisions at a pace I can actually manage, even, perhaps especially, when I'm trying to get a lot done in a few weeks. This was, I think, the other thing that worked about 2018. When I had longer periods in which to write, I was using them to make worldbuilding notes, write character profiles, and generally get out ahead of all that decision making. Without a regular work day, I will need to consider how to work in time for this part of the process. 

So, that's what I got. Dresden Files reread posts will resume later this week, and I've got two book reviews in the planning stages. Until then -  be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.