No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (12 page)

The fear of doing things imperfectly turns what should be fun, creative endeavors into worrisome tasks. With the Inner Editor on board, completing any extracurricular activity you haven’t already mastered is like trying to ride a bicycle uphill while towing a rhinoceros in a wagon behind you. This month, we lose the rhino.

Because this month, you’ll leave your Inner Editor here with me at the fully licensed, board-certified No Plot? No Problem! Inner Editor Kennel—where it can spend its days carping with other Inner Editors, happily pointing out typos in the newspaper and complaining about the numerous plot holes on daytime television.

It will be very, very happy here.

And you can have the beastie back in a month’s time, after you’ve written your book. Your Inner Editor, despite its incompatibility with rough drafts, is the perfect companion in the rewrite process. Because at that point, you will be giving it enough big-picture work to do that it won’t have the time or energy to exhaust you with nitpicky comments about every comma and contraction. So here’s the deal I’m proposing: I’ll take that heavy, anxious Inner Editor off your hands for four weeks. No charge. And in exchange, you promise to write your novel in a high-velocity, take-noprisoners, anything-goes style that would absolutely horrify it. All you need to do is touch the “Take My Inner Editor” button below, and a small, invisible team of humane, editor-removal specialists will be dispatched from the spine of this book to collect the thing for the kennel.

Since your Inner Editor will be lead away within a few seconds of you pressing the button, don’t touch it until you’re ready. Take a few moments if you need to. Once your Inner Editor is safely in our kennels (and well out of earshot), we’ll run through the last few things you need to know before setting out on your trip.

--------------------------------| TAKE MY INNER EDITOR |

---------------------------------WEEK ONE, DAY 2

TRUMPETS BLARING, ANGELS SINGING, AND TRIUMPH ON THE WIND (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 3,334 words]

Dear Writer,

Okay, with that behind us, let’s get ready to go. I have just three final requests before we get started.

-1) Please take this challenge very seriously.

You’ve signed the Month-Long Novelist Agreement and Statement of Understanding. Now see it through. Set regular writing goals, and stick to them. Your brain may be telling you it’s time to turn off the computer and go to bed. But the human brain, if left to its own devices, would spend its entire adult life napping in front of the television. Ignore your brain. Toughen up. Keep your butt in that chair until you’ve bagged the day’s quota. It’s the only way you’ll ever survive to see the finish line.

-2) Do not take any of this very seriously.

Writing a novel in a month is utterly ridiculous, an undertaking for fools and those who don’t know any better. Thankfully, we belong to the latter camp, which makes us dangerously powerful writers. Liberated from the constraints of constructing a pretty and proper novel, we are free to run, naked and whooping, through the valleys of our imaginations.

This month, your story will achieve an at-times frightening force and velocity. Go with it. Write wildly, joyfully, in huge and bounding strokes. Was that last page the worst thing you’ve ever written? Maybe. Does it matter? Nope. All words are good words this month. Follow tangents. Change directions at will. Stay loose. Make messes. Laugh at it all. You are doing something weird and wonderful here, and none of it will go on your permanent record.

-3) Know that you have done all of this before.

A novel is just a story that’s been bound. If there’s one thing humans excel at, it’s telling tales. Our narrative voices have been honed through years of conversation, letters, and gossipy emails. We know how to string audiences along, slowly deploying just enough of the juicy bits to keep them hanging. The ability to braid together life experiences in a compelling way is part of our birthright. Throughout the month, you’ll find yourself drawing on strengths and abilities you didn’t realize you possessed. There will be excruciatingly difficult days, sure. But the skills and tools to get you through the hard times are already within you. You’ve been writing a novel your whole life. This month is just the time when you finally get it down on paper.

Okay, let’s do a final check, and then you’re ready to head off.

Do you have:

• A magical writing totem or two?

• Your reference book?

• Music to write to?

• Snacks, drinks, and luxury pampering supplies?

Then you’re ready to go. Take a deep breath, head over to that word-processing device, and turn it on. I think there’s a novel that’s been waiting a long time to meet you. WEEK ONE, DAY 3

TRUMPETS BLARING, ANGELS SINGING, AND TRIUMPH ON THE WIND (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 5,001 words]

WEEK ONE ISSUES

At the start of each week, we’ll take a look at some of the time-specific hurdles, junctions, and waystations that you’ll be passing during those seven days on your way to 50,000 words. This week, we’ll look at the conundrums related to the first sentence, the first time you save your manuscript, and the end of the first chapter.

IT WAS THE BEST OF TIMES, IT WAS THE WORST OF TIMES: WRITING THE IDEAL FIRST

SENTENCE

The first sentence is, in many ways, a perfect microcosm of your novel. Meaning you’re probably worrying way too much about it.

Your first sentence does not need to reflect the dynamic character of your novel. It is not an oracle or bellwether for how well the month will go, nor is it a predictor of the beautiful or horrendous prose that will follow it. It’s simply a friendly announcement from your fingers to your brain that it best stop working on other things and get its butt down to your novel.

In this way, your first sentence is really just a set of chimes decorating the door of your novel, more of a ceremonial marker of a threshold than any sort of purposeful item. So go ahead and start the book off with whatever out-of-left-field image or statement occurs to you.

In my novels, I like to start with something storytelly to loosen my mental muscles. Past erudite winners have included: “Okay, the story starts like this... ” Or, “Crap. Time to start the novel. Okay, well, I guess it opens on... ” Or, most originally, “Once upon a time... ”

At some point, your first sentence will be reshaped into a beautifully inviting calling card for your book. Happily, that time is still at least a month away. For now you should go with whatever strikes your fancy.

THE NAME ON THE E-BIRTH CERTIFICATE: THE FIRST SAVE

The second big challenge of the month will come a few paragraphs after you solve the openingsentence dilemma—when you have to save your document for the first time, and you are suddenly confronted by the impersonal archivist of your word-processing program demanding that the book have a name.

If you already have a title, you’re golden. But if you only have a working title (or, more likely, no title at all), you may find yourself a little panicked at the prospect of having to choose a name this early in the process.

Since I always have trouble coming up with titles that feel appropriate or significant or even vaguely related to the unfolding book, I tend to call my files “awardwinningmasterpiece.doc” or

“dumbbooknumbertwo.doc” or something similarly nondescript. And when I finally come up with a title I like (usually around Week Three), I’ll do a Save As at the end of a writing session and—with much ceremonial toasting, bubble gum–cigar chewing, and dancing in the office chair—christen the novel with its new name.

KNOWING WHEN TO BRING THE CURTAINS DOWN: ENDING CHAPTERS

As you write this week, you will likely come up against another very good initial question. Namely: When am I supposed to end a chapter?

Some sections contain clear cut-points—a character going to bed, for example, or stepping in front of a bus—but early in the writing process, when you’re not exactly sure where your story is headed, your chapters are bound to be lopsided and distinctly unchapterlike, with some going on for thirty pages and others barely managing to last to the end of the first sentence.

This is a-okay. Later in the month you’ll begin carving out well-paced, evenly allocated chapters as you find your book’s rhythm. For now, you can’t have too many or too few, so chapter-ize at will, captain. WEEK ONE, DAY 4

TRUMPETS BLARING, ANGELS SINGING, AND TRIUMPH ON THE WIND (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 6,668 words]

WEEK ONE TIPS

Throughout the next four chapters, we’ll also take a look at some strategies that will come in especially handy in dealing with each week’s particular challenges. Week One’s tips center on leveraging the adrenaline rush of the first few days, avoiding the pernicious desire to self-edit as you write, creating a convenient home for your castaway thoughts, and maintaining momentum by keeping your story a mystery to those around you.

RIDE THE MOMENTUM

The first week of writing is an explosively productive creative period. With good reason. Your imagination, consigned to enjoying and analyzing other people’s creative efforts from the sidelines for so long, has finally been asked to send some ideas down onto the field for its own shot at the big time. Your imagination, understandably, is going to get a little overly excited at its moment in the spotlight. So rather than solemnly suggesting an orderly progression of characters and story ideas, it will send an entire screaming busload of contenders careening onto the field, where they will collide with each other, knock over the marching band, and wreak unholy havoc on the turf. This is a great, exhilarating moment, and you should ride it for all it’s worth. Even if you don’t know exactly how you’re going to fit those five ninjas into your courtroom drama, hey, they’ve arrived. And they want to be in the book. So put them in there. Inevitably they’ll do something for the plot. If their performance doesn’t end up meriting their inclusion, you can always clip them out later. That’s the beauty of novel writing: A panoply of strange characters, spread out over cities or continents, will somehow end up banding together midbook to construct your plot. You probably won’t see how this will happen early in the writing process, and you shouldn’t worry about it yet. Your role as a writer in Week One is just to continue to wave all of these payers down onto the field, and then write like hell to keep up with them.

With so much great input coming your way, Week One is a fantastic time to build up a comfortable word-count lead. If you’re not exhausted after writing the day’s 1,667-word quota, keep going to 2,000. And then to 3,000. On the first weekend of your mission, try to rack up 10,000 words if you can. You’ll be very thankful for the cushion when you arrive at Week Two. Which is when things, ahem, change a little.

DON’T DELETE, ITALICIZE

Even during anything-goes Week One, you’ll write a few things that you recognize right away just don’t fit in the book. Maybe you took a character in a new direction and didn’t like it, or had a conversation that revealed too much too soon.

When you write these things, whether they constitute a sentence, a paragraph, or an entire chapter, do not cut them. All words you write on your novel, no matter how misshapen or ill-advised, still represent crucial steps toward the 50,000-word finish line.

Rather than deleting these passages, put them in italics. Italics, in its skinny, slanted way, is the next best thing to nonexistence. And your words are already flagged for evaluation when your Inner Editor returns for the rewrite phase later.

If even the sight of your italicized miscues distracts you to the point of writing inactivity, you can take things a step further and change the color of the italicized text from black to white, rendering it invisible (yet still word-countable). At the end of the month, you can use the “select all” command to turn the entire draft back to black, and go in with your editing scalpel to make your excisions. WEEK ONE, DAY 5

TRUMPETS BLARING, ANGELS SINGING, AND TRIUMPH ON THE WIND (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 8,335 words]

WEEK ONE TIPS

START A NOVEL NOTES FILE

As you write, you’ll come up with a number of jokes, plot developments, and bits of dialogue that would be great to slip into the book at some point in the future. While your magical noveling notebook is still the main go-to for breakthroughs and discoveries you have while out exploring the real world, you should start a Novel Notes file on your computer, and have it open at all times while writing.

KEEP THE STORY TO YOURSELF

This is a tough one. On the one hand, you want instant feedback from those around you to reassure yourself that you’re on the right track. You also want those around you to understand what you’re doing and be proud of it.

My advice, though, is to not share the novel until it’s done. Feel free to read a few paragraphs aloud to loved ones, or email short passages to friends. But even sharing a small amount of your work-inprogress will encourage you to spend some amount of time editing and revising the text so it’s presentable.

This is a dangerous, slippery slope—largely because it sounds a high-pitch whistle that only your Inner Editor can hear. At which point the beast, realizing you haven’t been receiving your RDA of browbeating and self-criticism lately, will begin shaking the bars of the kennel, trying to get out and come help you.

That is the kind of help you can do without.

Also, anything short of an enthusiastic ovation from your audience will likely start making you worry about the quality of your work and the direction your story has taken. Even worse, your audience might misinterpret your sharing as a request for constructive criticism. At that point, the crippling self-doubt really kicks in, as you’ve just replaced your own Inner Editor with someone else’s. As much as possible, resist the temptation to share your work-in-progress with others. After you’ve finished the first draft, and you’ve gone through and tidied up the typos and whatnot, you can show it to whoever you like and get the feedback you’ll need to improve it. Actually, come to think of it, you also should resist the temptation to share your work-in-progress with yourself as you write as well. Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back and rerunning portions of a marathon midrace. The best plan is to keep moving forward, allowing yourself only an orienting glimpse back into your story when you set out on each day’s writing mission. All of this advice is ignored with no ill effects every year during NaNoWriMo by hundreds of writers, who post each day’s writing output on their personal Web sites. For these fearless souls, the benefits of having an audience expecting the next installment of the book outweigh the risks of critical feedback–killing momentum. It’s risky, though, and if you have anything less than an unshakable sense of confidence in your book, you should be especially wary of letting too much of your book get out into the world before it’s done.