The official goal of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is 50,000 words of a novel—1667 words per day. My goal, however, was to write every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I’d been suffering from writer’s block for several years. In the recent past, I could only get myself to write for about 30 minutes on most Saturday mornings—personal essays only. So this was a big step. And it worked. I wrote through the writer’s block. What helped most was that I learned about writing sprints—20 minutes or so of non-stop writing. I learned you can do it in groups. I learned that there’s a year-round supportive online community of writers. It was a huge step out of my secrecy—writing and posting to a free website, hoping no one would look at it, and no one did.
The problem with NaNo for me was producing what Anne Lamott calls “a really shitty first draft.” On the other hand, I wrote 9134 words, a prolog and five chapters of a novel. This novel had been simmering for years, and I’d never gotten beyond the prolog. It was a start.
Now, how do I continue? It has to be the same way. Less intense, but maintaining a time commitment, if not a word count commitment. Weekends were best. Hidden there was time I could free up. I thought I needed something like 3 hours, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons.
Another question: How do I write? In the past, the one novel I finished, I edited the previous day’s work, then continued to write. For this novel, I was a panster—I didn’t have an outline; I made things up as I went along. I also researched as I went along. For NaNo, to maximize word count, I had to outline, then just write, push ahead no matter what. In the former case, I ended up with a draft that, after one more edit, I presented to others—chapter by chapter—for suggestions.
The draft I’m producing now is really terrible. Will I persevere through the long editing process? For that matter, will I persevere through the long writing process? I don’t know. For now, I’m determined to continue—on Friday, Saturday and Sunday—to produce my appallingly awful first draft, to write through the damn self-criticism and doubt, and finish the dang thing. Then we’ll see. I’ll let you know.
