The Perfectionist's Guide to NaNoWriMo (Or How to Survive The First Draft Without Going Bald)

It's hard being a perfectionist writer. No joke. You all who fit the qualifications know what I mean. The urge to edit everything. The desire to make it right the first time. The need for every chapter, every scene, every word to be perfect.

That doesn't fly come NaNo time.

It's easy to read the rules and learn the guidelines. Easy to tell yourself "just write." And way, way easier said than done. After six years of NaNo and seven attempted novels, I've learned a few things about NaNo, first drafts, and not pulling your hair out when all you want to do is Make. It. Perfect.

1. Redefine Perfect on a Draft-by-Draft Basis

I think we can all come to a near-consensus on when our first draft perfection streak started: the first time a teacher, probably in middle or high school said, "This is a big project, so I want you guys to turn your first draft into me by next Friday." First draft? What's that nonsense? We'd been writing essays start to finish since our very first one. We'd perfected the last-minute, overnighter A+. Our first drafts are our only drafts. So we'd write up our turn-in-ready essay and make a few changes to dumb it down, give the teacher something to review. It really shouldn't have worked, but it did, and it ingrained in us the confidence that we don't really need to worry about drafts. We'll get it right the first time.

HahahahahHahahHAAHAHaaaaa

Thing is, though, a novel isn't an essay. There's a lot more room for error in 50,000 words than there is in 5,000. And when you realize 30k in that you have to completely redo everything because of a plothole you left in the third chapter, it's easy to give up. It's a failure, and we don't want to fail. Nothing less than an A, right?

The trick is to redefine "perfect" to the individual draft, to move the goalposts of perfection one draft at a time. Author Jane Smiley said, "Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist." Accept this as the gospel truth. The first draft's goalpost isn't "ready to publish," it's just "written." It doesn't matter if there's giant gaping plot holes. "No plot holes" is the goalpost for draft two. Or "no typos" or "no atrocious grammar" or whatever you want that second draft goalpost to be. Not "perfect perfect" though. That's at LEAST third draft, if not fourth or fifth.

2. Just Because You Wrote It Doesn't Mean You Have To See It

So you just wrote a 2,000 word scene and realize "this isn't working." You have to scrap it all. A whole day's writing, down the recycle bin. But before you hit that delete key, stop! You wrote that. And maybe part of it is salvageable or belongs in a different scene. Don't shortchange your wordcount or do something you may regret. Just hide it. You've got a number of options to make the bad text go away without actually going away forever.

• Make the text white or use black highlight on black text.
• Change the font to an unreadable one, like Wingdings.
• Move the text to the bottom of the document, several pages down, or if you're using a program like Scrivner, to a separate file.

You may be able to think of other tricks to make your mistakes disappear. Whatever you choose to do, implement it, from single sentences to whole chapters. During the first draft, and especially during NaNo, don't just delete haphazardly. That's part of draft two. Write that on your goalpost.

3. It's Okay To Skip Around or Come Back Later

If you're anything like me, you like your perfect drafts to be written in one long swoop, start to finish, Chapter 1 to The End. You write a book just like you read a book. Maybe the thought of breaking it up gives you cold sweats. After all, how can you accurately write the scene where the hero finally meets the villain if you don't know if the love interest is there or not, or if there's a mentor figure the villain's supposed to kill that you haven't introduced yet so you don't even know his personality!

This is me telling you, it's okay. It's okay to skip that awkward conversation if you don't know how to write it yet. It's okay to jump forward to the end when you too happy to write the death scene. It's okay to come back later, whether it's a huge event or a name for a minor character. Leave yourself a note, highlighted yellow and surrounded by attention-grabbing symbols (I like to do [ADD ____]). You don't need the paragraph or scene or chapter to be perfect now, only complete later. And I'll tell you why. You don't complete puzzles by doing one row at a time, in order, right? You get the pieces and parts you can figure out first (the outer frame, the obvious, odd colored pieces, etc) and then use those to fill in the rest. You can do that with your novel. It's just a puzzle where you decide what the picture is.

4. You're Always A Winner

It can feel like if you don't get that purple verified bar, you've failed. You'll want to pretend you never even tried, to make November and NaNo have just not happened for us. We're perfectionists because we don't like failure. But sometimes, despite our best efforts, even if we do everything right, we just can't win. Maybe life got in the way, or maybe you lost your drive. Whatever the reason, you lost.

But you've also won.

Whether you finish November with 100 words or 49,999, those are words you didn't have before. You WROTE. You created something that didn't exist before, and you have the road paved to keep going. There is nothing stopping you from keeping going beyond November. You don't have to put down the story and never look at it again just because you didn't finish it in the course of one month. The "victory" goal of NaNo is 50,000 words, but the real goal of NaNo is to just write. Did you write? Congrats. You've won. What did you win? The right to call yourself a writer. Heck yeah, that's awesome. And what are a few colored pixels compared to that?

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So, perfectionists, let go of your hair. November is coming, and you're going to write, and it's going to be just fine. Self-inflicted bald spots only lead to more stress. Scientific fact.

NaNoWriMo 2015: Conclusion

I don't like to lose.

I am driven by competition. It explains the sheer number of board games I had growing up. It doesn't explain why I was terrible at sports.

It's what makes NaNoWriMo so useful to me year after year. I can say to myself, "I want to accomplish X by Y date," but if I stumble along the way, I'll usually sit down and give up because I feel like I've got nothing to lose. When I sit down for NaNo and see that I and thousands of others have 50k to write by November 30th, well then, bring on the words. I want that purple bar and the winners prizes that I never use anyway. In the past, that motivation's gotten me five half-finished novels. I was worried about this year though. You may recall my goal was just to finish two novels, no matter how short it left me.

So, the verdict?

Aww yiss. I was close on my guess for how many words were left in BoBD and TG. I finished the second one at 37,000. At that point, with only 13,000 left to write and still on schedule, well, why not keep going?

Starting goal: Finish The Business of Being Dead and Trickster's Gambit (estimated completion: 30k)
End point:
The Business of Being Dead - Finished 11/17 (NaNoWC: 29,466)
Trickster's Gambit - Finished 11/22 (NaNoWC: 37,160)
The Henchman, planned but unwritten short story - Finished 11/25 (NaNoWC: 42,524)
Queen of Bones - In Progress (NaNoWC: 52,372)

Two finished novels, one finished short story, and a third novel on the last scene. I can actually finish three novels this year. I still have to remove the excess and see what the final word counts are. At least one will probably end up in "novella" length. I'm sure I'm going to need a lot of buffing on all three. Plus I realized a lot of plotholes while finishing Trickster's Gambit that made my planned ending not work. But you know what? I still finished it. I wrote the planned ending knowing it didn't make sense. It was... freeing. All this time I thought I'd given myself permission to write badly, but I hadn't. I had permission to write bad sentences, but I had never let myself write bad scenes. That was my stopping block. I had to fix the plotholes RIGHT THEN NO CONTINUING UNTIL FIXED DO IT NOW. But I wouldn't know how to do it, so I'd give up. Or I was missing scenes I needed, but wasn't sure how to write, so I'd give up. Or I'd write myself into a corner and didn't know how to get out of it, so I'd give up.

This time, with my goal of finishing, I let myself back up and restart. I let myself continue knowing I'd have to cut what I was doing in the next draft. I made myself shove through it so I could write "The End" and mean it. And now I have almost three first drafts to clean up. It feels incredible. And terrifying. Very terrifying. I can't wait to get started.

Brief NaNo Update

So far so good. Six days in and, after a slow start, I've caught up to my daily 2k goal. I'll likely loose some of that tomorrow when my mother comes to visit. Sunday and Monday will be catch-up days. Whether I'll hit 50k or not is still up in the air, but the story is moving, at least. Current project is The Business of Being Dead and I'm enjoying the new direction a lot more. The characters are growing better as people. They've hit rock bottom. Now to start pulling them out of the hole they dug.

I'm having a slow wordage day, so no big posts today. Next week, look for a huge post about my writing on a tag challenge from my friend A. F. Humphrey. If you take a look and want to take part, leave me a comment and I'll hit you up!

NaNo2014: Day 10 - Ch-Ch-Changes

One whole week in, and the story's been through some major changes. After I said last week how the first few days were slow and the MC wasn't taking the spotlight, I knew I needed to do something different to make it work. The trick, apparently, laid in the perspective. On the fourth day, I started writing in 1st person present, a perspective and tense I'd considered when I started but decided against for one reason or another.

I was such a fool. A fool!

My character wasn't coming to the front on her own, so I went into her head instead. The difference is astounding. I don't know how well I'm really doing. I'm going to need to reread Hunger Games or Divergent again to study the perspective after I'm done, but for now, I'm much more connected with Syn and her thoughts and feelings, things I just couldn't express in 3rd person past. I'm going to have to completely redo the whole first 8,000 words, but that's for after November.

There have also been a few unexpected surprises in characters. I intended for one to be a mix of Jeremy Renner and Hunger Games' Cinna. The character was to be Syn's hair designer and makeup artist, and Mr. Renner has a history of makeup artistry. Unusual past for an action star. I loved it. And then, when the time comes to meet this man, this Hagrid-esque giant named Daedalus knocks down Syn's door coming into the world with a, "Rise and shine! It's 6AM and there's hair that needs doing!" He's enormous, Scottish, and keeps a beard that belongs in a grooming competition. He is nothing at all like I planned for him to be. I adore him.

The biggest surprise of all, though, is that I'm not halfway through the story yet. Usually, by this time, I'm starting to sweat. I'll have gotten through a dozen planned scenes and fear I'm approaching the end too fast. By now, I'm afraid I only have 30k in the story, 35k at most. I always hit 50k in the end, but I'm always in the final scene, too. But this one? It's barely begun. I'm on scene 7 of my outline, and I have 18 planned out. Those don't even cover the whole story! There's still more to come after! There's no way I'm going to be done at 50k. I'm actually going to have a novel long enough to publish. I'm not going to have to fight and claw for extra words. It's hard to believe, after four years of doing this. It feels good. Maybe this is it. It feels like it's too early to be so optimistic, but I can't seem to help myself. It's only been a week, but it's a good NaNo so far.

NaNo Wordcount: 18,020

NaNo2014: Day 3 - Rebel?

All around the world on Saturday, pens started scratching on paper and fingers started clacking on keyboards as the clock ticked over to November's first midnight. It's NaNo time.

I thought I'd be rebelling this year. After all, I planned on working on Potential, and I already had 2000 words of it. Everyone knows NaNoWriMo rules say it has to be a new project, otherwise you're a rebel.

Well, the rules DID say that. Until this year, apparently. Seems things have changed and the metaphorical belts of the guidelines were loosened. So I'm working on Potential. And I am NOT rebelling.

It's been a slow first two days. The plot points weren't as solid as I thought, and my main character tried to take a sideline so her best friend could have the spotlight. As soon as BFF was brushed out the way, things got a lot easier. I know in edits I'm going to have to pull MC to the forefront while hopefully BFF won't end up being a darling to cut. I really do love her and her quirks, she's a perfect foil for the MC. Any changes will have to come in December, though. For now, I need to keep progressing. Edit later, write now.

NaNo Wordcount: 4,392

End of NaNo 2013

It's over. I lived. I emerged victorious. Exhausted, incomplete, and just barely over the finish line, but I made it.

Am I happy with the end result? Not really. I lost track of how to get from Point A to Point B at the end. I have scenes I like and scenes that I don't know what they're doing in there. There's a LOT of talking and not much action, which really bothers me. Ultimately, I feel like... I need to read something else. I haven't picked up a book in a few months (maybe since September?) and I think my brain has forgotten how to book. Seriously, it's nothing but "Characters go to Point A, talk, say "let's go" and go to point B, talk more," etc, etc. The action scenes that are there, I really like. I like them a lot. But they're so far between each other with lots of nonsense chatter in the middle.

So this one's going to sit and simmer a while. It needs something different to finish it. There's a missing ingredient and I don't know what it is. I'm going to move on to some other things and see what happens.

And now I'm suddenly wondering if I've got my 2nd male MC's sex wrong. Was Daniel supposed to be Danielle? It'd be breaking a MAJOR gender role in the setting. Daniel's a deputy, a rough and tumble tough guy, the man of the house while his father is gone.

...I think I have some things to think about.

NaNo Day 25

21 Days Later... oh wait, I was gonna blog about this, wasn't I?

It's been a trip. The second weekend, barely a week in, I fell behind. I skipped a day in favor of going to a comic convention and seeing Thor: The Dark World with friends. I figured I wouldn't have trouble catching up. And then the wall came up. Oh, what a wall. I tried going around it. There was another one just waiting for me from the other angle. So I fell, I sobbed, I moaned, I said "I can't do it anymore, I'm done. This is terrible and I don't want to do it anymore."

You know, the normal Week 2/3 NaNo. But I really was ready to throw in the towel and give up. All my characters were doing was going somewhere and talking, going somewhere else, talking. There wasn't any action, and eventually, I didn't know where they were going anymore. That's where I got stuck. Even if I got unstuck, I was going to get to 30k at most. I was ready to give it all up. And then the pep talk came in. Lev Grossman, never heard of him. Still, couldn't hurt to read it, right?

Thank you, Mr. Grossman. You said all the right things at all the right times. You said exactly what I needed to hear. You told me I wasn't alone, this was normal, and I could get through it. I'd read it a thousand times before, but in that moment of darkness, as the curtain was falling on my novel, you said, "Wait, not yet."

I got up. I looked at the wall from another angle. I went back to the outlining I had been doing before NaNo and started to fill it out. I made a tiny hole in the wall. I went home and wrote. I broke through the first wall and filled in the gap I'd left (the first time I've ever skipped a scene). I went back to the other wall and just kept on going. Last night, I finally caught up on my deficit with a pretty 40,010 word count for the evening. The major subarc just finished, so I have 10k to get the rest of the main arc, which now involves more than I originally intended. My 30k prediction may end up getting me to 50k after all.

So thank you, Mr. Grossman. Thank you for the hand, for the leg up, for the right words at the right time. I'm gonna make it after all.

As long as hosting Thanksgiving for the first time doesn't kill me first.

NaNo Day 4

Three days in and all is fairly well. Right now I'm managing a scene a day, but I've only got two more scenes planned out before we hit uncharted territory. I'm so bad at planning the middle...

I'm happy with the characters so far. The main three have their own personalities that are coming out on the page well. The third one I introduced even made his appearance before I realized it was him. Considering he's a spontaneous troublemaker, it fit that he's even playing games with me. End result is what I think is my best action sequence yet. It's probably still terrible, but I'm happy with it. I just hope I can stretch the middle long enough to fill the month. I'm already starting to worry. I mean, if I don't make 50k with this story, that's fine. I have plenty of other things to start. I'm just a habitual underwriter, and I'd like to get out of this gray area between novellas and novels. I just don't know how to add more.

Day 3 wordcount: 5,078/50,000.