No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (15 page)

-1) Lose any word debt you’ve accumulated.

If you fell behind in the grim slog of Week Two, you’ll need to turn the productivity up a notch or three. To help enable this, the No Plot? No Problem! Employment Outreach Team has talked to your boss and brokered an agreement: You are henceforth allowed to novel on company time as long as nobody sees you doing it. (Under the terms of this agreement, you are also allowed to print out three copies of your finished novel on the office laser printer after everyone’s gone home for the night.) Whether you’re writing from home or work, the month’s timetable says you should have about 35,000

words by the end of this week. Ignore this timetable if you’re far behind, focusing instead on hitting 30,000 words by the week’s close. Whatever you do, though, breach the 30s by the dawn of Week Four.

-2) Let gravity be your guide.

Things open up toward the middle of Week Three. The pitch of the noveling trail will shift beneath your feet, pointing you downhill at a steep slope. As your tale picks up speed, your first reaction may be to try to slow yourself, to steady your progress to an even and orderly pace. Screw that. This is your time to fly.

Why? Because it’s all going to start coming together this week. The ninjas your imagination randomly introduced in your courtroom drama back in Week One? They’ll appear before the judge this week with some testimony that will turn the case upside down. The unstoppable zombies terrorizing the Phish concert will cease their marauding and begin to stagger as a single, piercing guitar note rings out over the crowd. And lowly bartender Ngiam Ton Boon at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore will reach out for gin and grab cherry brandy by mistake, changing the destiny of colonial-era alcoholics forever. Week Three is when it all happens—when all those loose ends begin lashing themselves together as if by magic, creating connections and passageways through your novel that are both apt and effortless. Do well in this week, and the novel is yours for the taking.

-------------------CAN I GIVE UP NOW?

No. You cannot give up now.

--------------------SECTION TWO, CHAPTER 7

WEEK THREE, DAY 16

CLEARING SKIES, WARMER WEATHER, AND A JETPACK ON YOUR BACK

[Today's Goal: Reach 26,672 words]

WEEK THREE ISSUES

STANDING HALFWAY AND SEEING THE FUTURE: APPRAISING YOUR PROGRESS

You’ve officially crossed the continental divide of your novel month at this point. Congratulations!

Now is a perfect moment for you to put word count issues aside, size up your story, and figure out how close you are to The End.

In your guesstimation, are you:

-A) More than halfway through with your story?

-B) Exactly halfway through with your story?

-C) Less than halfway through with your story?

If you answered A or B, hallelujah. Great job. Continue full speed ahead. You’re right on track with the pacing. If you’re worried about running out of story before you hit 50,000 words, don’t. For one, you probably have more wrapping up to do than you realize. And for two, a prologue, epilogue, and table of contents can always be conjured at the last minute to push your book over the edge of 50,000 words. There will be plenty for you to do if you reach the end of your novel before you reach the summit of your word count, so write quickly and with confidence.

If you answered C, though, we need to talk.

The goal here is to have your 49,999th and 50,000th words be “The” and “End.” Not because your book will really be 50,000 words when you’ve had a chance to edit it. In fact, your story will probably gain an extra 10,000 to 50,000 words around its midsection during revisions. No, you should try to write a complete story this month because you’ll find the visionary work of creation becomes much, much more difficult after your #A30/31/50k deadline expires and your Inner Editor moves back home to live with you again.

For the next two weeks of writing, you will be bathing in dizzying amounts of momentum and literary moxie. You’ll be closer to your characters than you may ever be again. All of which makes this the perfect time to nail down major decisions regarding plot and storyline. If you are still introducing characters and haven’t yet sent them out in search of a plot, you should sit down and figure out where they’re going now. What are the essential scenes you can focus on writing over the next two weeks so that you can have an entire story arc completed in two week’s time? Skip ahead if you need to—using lots of in-text notes (“here is where the podiatrist will admit to Nancy that he’s an alien”) to keep track of the parts you’re skipping over—and write only those scenes that move the story forward.

It can be disheartening to realize that you aren’t going to be able to write every scene in your novel before the month ends, but I can tell you from experience that it is much easier to fill in connecting scenes and interludes during rewriting than it is to have to conceive and write the final five chapters of a story after the month has ended. Avoid that by bending your story arc now so its tail-end is pointing squarely at 50k.

WEEK THREE, DAY 17

CLEARING SKIES, WARMER WEATHER, AND A JETPACK ON YOUR BACK

[Today's Goal: Reach 28,339 words]

WEEK THREE ISSUES

“YOU’RE STILL WORKING ON THAT THING?”: WHEN SUPPORT NETWORKS ATTACK

Some NaNoWriMo participants are blessed with fanatical cheering sections and relentlessly supportive groups of friends and family who constantly ply them for details about their work-in-progress. These good-hearted folks make care packages stuffed with frozen pizzas and unmarked bills, and listen, enraptured, to the stories about life as an amateur novelist.

The other 99 percent of us have a somewhat less saintly support network. Our caregivers are dispensing bemused glances on good days, and are hurling our unwashed dishes at our heads on bad ones. However, no matter how enthusiastic or disinterested your fans have been up till now, you’ll probably notice an ebbing in their support this week.

It makes sense. Having a novel appear in your life so suddenly is like finding a baby—or a very small person convincingly dressed as a baby—on your doorstep. As you acclimate to the new presence in your life, old routines go out the window, and friends and family are inevitably pushed aside as you figure out how best to make room for the addition.

And like a baby, a novel is largely a personal miracle; the tiny joys of your writing process usually won’t resonate with other people, no matter how close you are to them. Like many month-long writers, three-time winner Rise Sheridan-Peters finds this discrepancy between the joy of the book and the sorrow of friends and family especially pernicious in Week Three.

“I’m finally figuring out what the book is about,” Rise says, “and everyone else in my life is counting the days until the book is done. I want them to sit and look at me raptly while I tell them that what’s inside the suitcase turned out to be a forged reliquary with a fake saint’s arm that’s actually filled with designer drugs from a lab at MIT. They just want to know if we’re ever going to eat another meal that didn’t come in a bag with a plastic spork.”

As you head into your third week of missed social engagements and poor performance on household chores, your friends and loved ones will be slowly realizing that if you were going to quit your book, you probably would have done so already. Which means another two weeks of closed doors and sporky dinners.

This may bring out a little grouchiness in your support team, mostly because they miss you. Or they at least miss the less annoying version of you who could sit through an entire movie without later discussing how many words you could have written in that two-hour period. So, give a little love and understanding back, and assure your support networks that the thing is almost over.

WEEK THREE, DAY 18

CLEARING SKIES, WARMER WEATHER, AND A JETPACK ON YOUR BACK

[Today's Goal: Reach 30,006 words]

WEEK THREE TIPS

ACTIVATING THE 6,000-WORD JETPACK UNDER YOUR SEAT

Tremendous come-from-behind victories have been a part of month-long noveling since the dawn of the sport. One of the easiest ways to go from out-of-contention to head-of-the-pack is by harnessing the power of 6,000-word days. These are much easier to pull off than you might imagine. Here is a step-by-step guide to turning on your noveling jetpack:

-1) Pick a Saturday or Sunday when you have approximately two-hour pockets of free time spread throughout the morning, afternoon, and evening.

-2) Wake up early and have a large, healthy breakfast. Or some coffee and a cigarette, whichever is easiest.

-3) Do three 30-minute writing sessions in a row, separated by 10-minute stretching/wristshaking/fetal-position-holding and complaining breaks.

-4) Go have fun, and come back and repeat the same 3/30/10 schedule feat after lunch.

-5) Do something else, and after dinner and some post-meal loafing, head to the computer and do another three 30-minute sessions.

-6) At this point, you will have added 6,000 words to your tally, and can go to sleep dreaming of friendly agents bringing oversized advance checks to your door.

To exponentially increase the power of your jetpack, follow this regimen two days in a row. You will be floored by how much more lovable the world is when you add 12,000 words to your count over one weekend.

WEEK THREE, DAY 19

CLEARING SKIES, WARMER WEATHER, AND A JETPACK ON YOUR BACK

[Today's Goal: Reach 31,673 words]

WEEK THREE TIPS

OUT OF SIGHT BUT NOT OUT OF MIND: BANISHING THE LAST TRACES OF YOUR INNER

EDITOR

News from your Inner Editor! I just dropped by the kennel, and your Inner Editor is doing very well in your absence. While I was there, it was in the middle of correcting the pitch and pronunciation of a group of elementary-school carolers who had come by to spread good cheer. I’ve never seen an editor so happy.

Despite your IE’s contented distance, you may still be feeling its presence this week in the form of writing or creative blocks. If you are feeling stymied at Week Three, you were probably cursed with a more dictatorial Inner Editor than most. Here are some ways for you to cope with this style-cramping, book-blocking situation.

-1) Break things.

Don’t break real-world things (which tend to be expensive), but things in your novel. Your Inner Editor has long served the role of an overly protective parent. Now that your parent is out of town, it’s time you leveraged those lessons from Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, and other helpful high school instructional videos: It’s time to throw a party and trash the house. Pick out a character that’s been causing you no end of grief, and do something big and reckless with them. Have them exiled out of the story or get swallowed by a wormhole while waiting for the bus. If you’ve hit a standstill in your efforts to bring two obviously perfect romantic leads together, kill one of them. Your readers won’t see it coming, and in figuring out how to fix the mess you’ve just made of your story, you’ll give your imagination the kind of fertile improvisational environment it needs to thrive.

-2) Make a pact with yourself to eventually destroy all evidence that this novel ever existed. Part of your blockage may be the fact that you’re already worrying about what people are going to say about your rough draft. This is an unnecessary worry, as everyone’s month-long novels are crappy, but you can address the worry directly by figuring out how you’ll destroy your novel as soon as it’s finished. Will you print it out, then burn it on the barbecue grill? Or bury the thing in the woods by the light of a full moon?

Once you absolutely remove from your mind the possibility that anyone else will read your work, you’ll likely find yourself enjoying the writing process much more. Also, destroying your novel before anyone reads it will give you a sexy allure that’s part Zen letting-go and part Jimi Hendrix writhing over his flaming Telecaster. Yeeeowch.

-3) Go small.

If you’ve stopped writing because you can’t shake the feeling that all of your plot directions are unworthy, give your plotting brain a break by focusing on things that won’t advance the story. Write 2,000 words about a sign dangling from a hot dog stand across the street from your protagonist’s house. Spend pages describing the perfume your love interest wears, and why it’s exactly the wrong thing for her. Write around the periphery of your story. Write beside or below your story. But whatever you do, just keep writing. Even if you spend the next couple of days writing background material, you’ll have built a hell of a great nest for your story when you find your groove again. WEEK THREE, DAY 20

CLEARING SKIES, WARMER WEATHER, AND A JETPACK ON YOUR BACK

[Today's Goal: Reach 33,340 words]

WEEK THREE EXERCISES

PUTTING YOUR STORY ON THE MAP

One of the worst things about being an adult is not getting to color as often as we should. This week, give your monitor-burned eyeballs a rest for an hour or so and go old-school, forsaking the computer for a big piece of blank paper and some colored pencils or crayons. The goal of this exercise is to make a map of your fictional world. On the map, you should include all of your characters’ homes, their schools or workplaces, and any places they’ve already visited in the book. This may be the first time that you’ve thought about the spatial layout of your world, so feel free to make things up as you go.

After you’ve placed everything that already exists in your book on the map, go in with a loose hand and start creatively filling in and adding other details and landmarks, everything from beaches to parks to clocktowers to cathedrals to bondage-gear shops. It’s okay to get a little crazy, adding an ancient amphitheater behind a dry cleaning shop, or a whale-harpooning station atop City Hall. The map is partially for referencing later, but it’s also a creative exercise in its own right. It’s a chance to draw up your world just for fun and to see if any of these off-the-cuff imaginings might be something you’d like to incorporate into your noveling reality.