Precocious Advice for NaNoWriMo

I thought I would go through what I felt I learnt last year, as much for my benefit as anyone else's.

1. Plan

Planning is a real necessity if you want something other than "just" 50,000 words by November 30th, but be careful. If we imagine a line, and at one end of the line is Slaughterhouse Five, and at the other end is, say "A man's concept of time is shattered and he revisits all his experiences in a jumble, from the bombing of Dresden to being abducted by aliens and kept in a zoo" at the other end, then that line becomes a kind of spectrum of planning from "idea" all the way through to "novel" (which is a kind of absolute plan, if you like) . The plan that you want at this stage is probably about a tenth of the way along from the idea. You want to keep it loose, little more than a structure with maybe some details for the opening and the finish. You will probably have some major plot points already, but for the plan you just need to know when in the 50k they happen.

2. Don't chain yourself to your plan

This seems like a contradiction to point 1 but it reallys isn't. Once you get your characters going you may find that you can't quite maneuvre them into position as easily as you'd like. It's at moments like these that you have to abandon aspects of the plan, or revise it. Sometimes you will find you have to set up the environment in which a character exists in order to get the response you need. All of this is much easier if you don't invest too heavily in the planning stage - that's why you want to keep the plan nearer the "idea" end of the spectrum. Thos plot points I mentioned earlier are best thought of not in terms of things happening, but as a set of effects that you wish to befall either your characters or your plot - keep the details loose, and think chiefly of what you need out of the plot point to get you to your big finalé.

3. Enjoy your characters

Seems obvious but you're going to be spending a good deal of time with these people, and you're counting on other people spending a good deal of time with them too, so even the bad guys have got to be the sort of bad guys it might be fun to hang out with.

4. Vignette Vignette Vignette

A down and dirty trick I pulled a couple of times in Bad Aji was to utilise cut scenes, picking up fairly minor characters and giving them a few hundred words or so on their own. This was mainly for cut-aways so I could hit the ground running on subsequent scenes, so very useful not just for the word count but for pace. I also tried to make sure that the vignettes bring something to the table - try and tell more of the central story through them.

5. Leave Work For Tomorrow

Not to be confused with procrastination, it is really really benefitial if you have something you can start tomorrow, which invariably means not finishing up a scene the night before, or it can just mean knowing what's coming next.

6. If you're bored, make a leap

I'm loathe to raise any qualitative points, because quality is something that happens in December, but some, like "enjoy the characters," have as much to do with making your writing journey pleasurable as with the quality of your first draft. From a critical point of view I would say that if you are bored writing it, people will be bored reading it, and as this is NaNoWriMo, this is where you should feel free to jazz things up a little. At a lull in Bad Aji I decided to strip a couple of the main characters, pretty much just because I could (though it helped tie the two of them together) (not literally). Sudden events, twists or turns are a great way of catching your second or third wind and can often take your plotting into whole new territories that you never knew existed. Which brings us to...

7. Develop themes along the way

Bad Aji started out with the idea that someone who believed themselves to be a temp going from job to job was actually working the same job over and over again, but had their memory tinkered with every couple of months. The title and the key aspect of the novel, the influence that dead characters have over the living, all arose along the way. If you can discover themes in your writing and emphasise them as you go along, it will give you further sources of inspiration, and better tools with which to solve problems and make decisions about your writing.

8. Grab everything you can from life even if it is nailed down

All writing is autobiographical, which is not to say that C S Lewis ever went to Narnia, but that we can only write about what we know about (which sometimes means finding out about what we want to write about). Whereas lifting characters and events wholesale from real life carries with it dangers (but smoke 'em if you got 'em), do not be afraid of taking the beefsteak of reality, mincing it up, and coming up with some tasty burgers. Although time is short try to embrace the experiences and events that have taken place in your life recently or are scheduled for November. Bad Aji's showdown at the Tate Modern was there because I'd visited the gallery and was taken with the slides that were installed at the time. Stoole's trip to Marlow was more or less my own (my school, thankfully, had existed after all).

9. The epilogue - Productive cheating

I realised with a few days to go that I was going to run out of story before I hit 50,000, which would have been a better realisation to have had on the tenth, say, than with the finishing line in sight. I had two choices, which was to fill before I got to the showdown (and ruin the chase that had been set up) or to cheat and come up with an epilogue. I chose the latter, which led to one of my favourite sections from Bad Aji, and allowed me to give my central character some kind of resolution after his tragic demise. It can be useful to pull characters temporarily out of the narrative and give them some headspace for them to make the big decisions.

10. Don't be led by round numbers

Or any kind of structure or order that doesn't spring organically from what you are writing. I've seen people ask things like "how many chapters should I write" but if you're going to write 50,000 words, then the number of chapters oughtn't be a factor. You've got your story, let that be your guide.

11. Narrative can be vertical as well as horizontal

If you're running out of story, don't just think in terms of lengthening the plot; try bunging in a subplot or two. It sounds really obvious but if you send some characters off to do some business, either aiding the central narrative or as an aside, then you get more words out of it with little replotting. And with business happening away from the main action, you'll have more cutting points to choose from which ought to help you get round the stuff you don't want or need to write about.