No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (4 page)

--------------------

WRITING IN PACKS

Along with a rigid, rigorous deadline and an anything-goes writing approach, there is one more prerequisite for pulling a surprisingly competent book out of yourself quickly: finding company. Ideally, you will find people interested in taking the noveling plunge alongside you, cranking out their own questionable master-works in the same month you do. But “company” can also simply mean finding nonwriting friends and loved ones who agree to check in on your progress throughout the month, providing a little friendly support along the way.

If you’ve been writing fiction for a while, you may already be a member of a writing group. The typical writing group, however, is actually a reading group; it’s there to give feedback on works each member produces in isolation. The group you want to form now is one where you meet up only to write. No sharing. No critiques. No feedback whatsoever. Just pure, unadulterated output. For most people (and I used to count myself among them), writing is a private act, and the thought of writing en masse sounds both terrifying and highly unproductive. Give it a shot. You’d be surprised how much the clack of other people typing brings out the novelist beast in you, and how much the push of friendly competition will keep you working on your story even when you’re ready to kill all of your characters.

The goal, ultimately, is to move your novel from the realm of private suffering to a matter of public record. The help of a writing community and the fear of public failure are both invaluable motivators, and both have a way of turning an already strong 50,000-word mission into a fait accompli.

ACTIVATING YOUR DEADLINE

Before you can let everyone know that you’re writing a novel in a month, you first need to square it with yourself. So go get that calendar and pick out the best month for you to do this. No month is going to be perfect, but here are some signs of a good one: abysmal weather, a built-in three-day weekend, and a month where your family or housemates might accidentally be beamed to another galaxy for thirty days.

Barring that, all months are pretty much equal. The one bit of advice I do offer in choosing your timeframe is to write over the course of a calendar month, rather than simply picking thirty-one consecutive days. Structure and drama are both essential in the coming endeavor, and both will be heightened if your deadline coincides with a month’s end.

Once you’ve picked your month, just read and sign the No Plot? No Problem! “Month-Long Novelist Agreement and Statement of Understanding (Deadline #A30/31/50k)” available from the link below. Then meet me at chapter two. We have some planning to do.

THE MONTH-LONG NOVELIST AGREEMENT AND STATEMENT OF UNDERSTANDING

http://www.dailylit.com/books/no-plot-no-problem/form1

WHAT DOES 50,000 WORDS LOOK LIKE?

The book you’re holding in your hands is now almost exactly 50,000 words. Some other novels checking in at around 50,000 words in length include:

-The Great Gatsby

-by F. Scott Fitzgerald

-Brave New World

-by Aldous Huxley

-The Blue Flower

-by Penelope Fitzgerald

-The Catcher in the Rye

-by J. D. Salinger

-The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

-by Douglas Adams

-The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

-by Mark Twain

-True Grit

-by Charles Portis

-Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture

-by Douglas Coupland

-Happy All the Time

-by Laurie Colwin

-Ghost Children

-by Sue Townsend

-Of Mice and Men

-by John Steinbeck

However, keep in mind that the 50,000-word rough draft you write next month will likely balloon out by 10,000 to 50,000 words in a rewrite. The typical paperback you see on a bookstore shelf is about 100,000 words, with shorter genre fiction, like serial romances or sci-fi tie-ins, coming in at 50,000 to 70,000 words.

--------------------

CHAPTER 2

TIME-FINDING, NEWS-BREAKING, AND A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO TRANSFORMING

LOVED ONES INTO EFFECTIVE AGENTS OF GUILT AND TERROR

Tim Lohnes was in pain. The thirty-year-old Oakland cartographer was less than a week into NaNoWriMo, and his story was floundering.

“I just didn’t know what to do with my characters,” he says. “Plus, my wrists were hurting, and I had three work projects that were keeping me up until 2:00 A.M. every night.”

Tim tried to resurrect the story in the second week, managing to get his word count up to 12,000. But it just wasn’t happening, and that’s when Tim stopped working on the book entirely. Then, with three days left in the writing month, Tim got a new idea for his book. “I just started feeling it,” he says.

Tim dove into his tale for a third time. And this time it caught. Tim raced against time, sleeping five hours a night, pounding out 38,000 words in three days, typing “The End” at the 50,006-word mark. There were fifteen minutes left to go on the month’s clock.

All of this would be utterly extraordinary if Tim didn’t do it this way every year. Yep. In five years of doing NaNoWriMo, Tim has always written most of his book, and become a winner every time, at the last minute. And he’s not alone. In last year’s NaNoWriMo, hundreds of writers leapt from four-digit word counts to the 50,000-word finish line in the final few days of the contest. Tim—and the other writers who have learned to turn procrastination into performance art—would be the first to admit that writing an entire manuscript in three days exacts a high toll on your book and your body. But their rocket-fueled exploits underline an important fact of this whole endeavor: Writing 50,000 words of fiction really doesn’t take that much time. Slow writers find they can write about 800

words of novel per hour; a speedy writer (and good typist) can easily do twice that. Which means that the whole novel, from start to finish, will take an average writer about 55 hours to write. If you had the luxury of writing eight hours a day, seven days a week, you could begin on a Monday morning and be wrapping up your epilogue in time for brunch on Sunday. The truth is, though, that few of us have the luxury of writing eight hours a day, seven days a week. In fact, between school, jobs, and the host of other daily events that fill our lives, carving 55 hours of quiet time, however small that number looks on paper, ends up being quite a challenge. Enter the Time Finder.

FINDING YOUR FORGO-ABLE WITH THE TIME FINDER

The Time Finder is to novel-planning what the Jaws of Life are to accident scenes. But rather than extracting precious things from tight places, the Time Finder does the opposite: It helps wedge large valuables into impossibly small spaces. The tool is the ideal way to discover the answer to the inevitable question, “Where the hell am I going to find the time to write a novel?”

To use it, you only need some paper, a pen, and some red, blue, and green highlighters (or colored pencils). You’ll also need five minutes a night for seven nights in a row. And before you start complaining about getting homework already, let it be known: There are treats involved. Here’s how it works: Before you go to bed every night, sit down with your paper and pen, and write down everything you did that day, broken down into half-hour increments. Start with the moment you woke up and carry it through to the time you turned on the Time Finder. For me—a freelance writer—

yesterday’s list would look like this:

-8:30–9:00 Made and consumed breakfast.

-9:00–9:30 Showered, brushed teeth, got dressed. Laid back down in bed. Reluctantly got back up again.

-9:30–10:30 Emailed friends.

-10:30–1:30 Worked.

-1:30–2:30 Ate lunch while emailing friends and surfing the Internet.

-2:30–5:00 Worked some more.

-5:00–5:30 Drove to the post office. Returned.

-5:30–6:00 Read the Onion and watched dumb music videos online.

-6:00–6:30 Checked email.

-6:30–7:00 Talked on the phone, considered cleaning the apartment.

-7:00–7:30 Went for short walk.

-7:30–8:30 Went out to dinner with girlfriend (note to self: never again eat a deep-fried anything that’s referred to as an “awesome blossom”).

-8:30–9:00 Took a stab at actually cleaning up apartment, halfheartedly washed some dishes, called parents.

-9:00–9:30 Hastily assembled package I was supposed to send for Mom’s birthday two weeks ago.

-9:30–10:00 Paid bills.

-10:00–11:00 Worked.

-11:00–12:00 Skimmed the newspaper, read a little bit of a novel.

-12:00–12:30 Remembered I was supposed to email an editor about an assignment. Wrote email and sent it off.

-12:30 Activated Time Finder.

After you’ve finished each daily log, reward yourself with a delicious, nonnutritious treat, and then go to sleep. (Sleep, by the way, should not be included on the Time Finder’s list of items, as hoarding as much sleep as possible every night is the birthright of amateur writers everywhere.) After you’ve carefully documented your activities for one week, bust out the highlighters or colored pencils, and go to town. First, go through and circle or underline every REQUIRED activity in red. These are the top-tier items that you have to do every day or risk unemployment, eviction, expulsion, or mental collapse. Things in this category would be basic acts of personal hygiene, commutes to work or school, actual working, running work-related errands, eating meals, shuttling friends or family around, grocery shopping, and paying bills.

Next, go through the lists and mark the HIGHLY DESIRED activities in blue. In this category go the things that, if push came to shove, you could get by without doing for a month, but which would cause major stress or hardship. This second tier of activities could include exercising, returning social phone calls and emails, attending friends’ birthday parties, or going to professional or religious get-togethers. Finally, take that last color and mark all the FORGO-ABLE activities that you could give up for a month without courting disaster. This includes Internet surfing and chat-room trawling, online shopping, TV-watching, making art, nonessential home repairs, hobby-based tinkering, and recreational reading.

Okay, now it’s time to shift the Time Finder into overdrive. Go through the forgo-able items, and add up how many hours you spend per day, on average, in their pursuit. As you can see from my list, I tend to spend about three hours every day doing things that I could sacrifice for thirty days without my life falling apart.

If, like me, you’ve found that you’re spending between an hour and a half to two hours a day on forgo-able items, you’re golden. These will be your sacrificial lambs next month. Say good-bye to them now, and know they will still be there when you pick them up again in thirty days. When I’m writing a novel, I stop Internet surfing entirely, limit my leisure reading, and spend much less weeknight time with (non-noveling) friends. Other writers use the opportunity to pare back conversations with their in-laws and stop doing yard work. The choice is yours; all you need to do is find an hour and a half or so per day in the forgo-able category and you’ve got a green light to write. If you can’t trim the fat you need from the forgo-able items, you’ll need to slice into the meat of your highly desired activities. Because these are more important, the best approach is to cut down on frequency rather than eliminate them entirely. Plan on skipping a few meetings, ducking out of birthday parties early, or making your child hitchhike home from school a couple of days a week. If you find yourself dipping into the “required” category to come up with the hours, congratulations. You are in the top .5 percent of busy people everywhere. The good news about this is that you’ve only survived this long by multitasking at an Olympic level. You’ll be able to bring all those keen timemanagement skills to bear on your novel. If you haven’t had a heart attack yet, odds are good you probably won’t next month either.

Let’s assume, though, that you, like most people, can get ten to fourteen hours a week through some basic leisure-time restrictions. If that’s the case, leave everything else in your life alone. It may be tempting to use the novel as a cornerstone for a total lifestyle overhaul, but this is a decidedly bad time to implement ambitious changes in your life.

In fact, the best thing you can do for yourself, your manuscript, and those around you is to keep as many of your old routines as possible. Being available for a minimum of social activities helps keep your mind fresh for the book, and also forestalls mutiny among your friends and family.

-------------------NOVELING THROUGH THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM: THE NANOWRIMO TEMPORAL

VORTEX

In my forays into month-long noveling, I’ve repeatedly noticed something that seems, on the surface, impossible. Which is this: When I introduce novel writing into my schedule, I actually seem to have more time, for running errands and goofing off. Other a NoNoWriMo participants have confirmed the phenomenon, which seems to stem from a short-term willingness to maximize every minute of the day to startlingly productive effect. A side effect of this is that the moments that you do choose to spend in leisure activities become imbued with a sort of technicolor radiance—with everyday pleasures like unhurried conversations and ambling window-shopping taking on a near-sexual lushness. Strange, but true.

THE GOLDEN RULE OF SCHEDULING

Though every productive noveling schedule is unique, and what works for one frantic writer won’t necessarily work for another, there is one golden rule you should keep in mind when laying out your writing schedule: Don’t take more than two nights off from your novel in a row. Taking three or more nights away from your book back to back to back will not only stall whatever momentum you’ve developed in the story, it will also give your brain too much time to come up with doubts and other foot-dragging assessments of your work. In the same way cults tend to keep recent converts inside the compound walls, so should you make sure your brain doesn’t go AWOL for too long from your book.