NaNoWriMo

I'm participating in NaNoWriMo this year, and 24 days in, I know I'm not going to be a winner.  For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's held each year in November.  You sign up online, with the goal of finishing a novel in a month by writing about 1660 words per day.  That's it.  There are no fees, no check-ins, nothing except the solidairty of working with other writers struggling to finish those words counts.  You "win" by getting to the 50,000 word mark by the end of November, and having it verified by uploading your file onto the website.  There are no actual prizes although several companies are offering discounts on products/services to the winners.

First of all, I think NaNoWriMo is a great idea, and run very well.  It is just loose enough to keep you from feeling as if you have added yet another adminstrative/reporting task to your day.  But through pep talks delivered to your inbox, charts to track your progression and a healthy online forum, you feel a strong sense of connection to everyone else going through the process. 

So, sometime around Halloween (nothing like waiting until the last minute!) I signed up with the hopes that I could finish a draft of book two of "Fame, Love and other Lessons".  Which I imagnatively titled "Book Two". 

I did great for the first three days, but then life intruded.  Now, the NaNo folks prepare you for this.  I've also done a modified version of NaNo on my own (reading founder Chris Baty's book, "No Plot, No Problem") so I knew what to expect.  But I have to say, this past November was the month I hit my limit.  I started an intense, accelerated Master's program in the Fall, and began working full-time; two huge changes in my life from the first book.  Either one would have been enough, but coupled with the typical Murphy's Law reality of my life, I realized very quickly that I had hit a wall. 

I love the Food Network and Pinterest boards showing beautiful 1%'ers homes in the same way I love time management books:  because they allow me to imagine a different version of who I am.  A well organized, efficient and creative woman comfortably ensconsed in a home where I have nothing to do except write in my beautifully appointed home office and concentrate on my work whilst gazing out at my peony garden through large, spotless bay windows.  Except this time, I realized that no amount of time management was going to save me.  This wasn't a time management issue, it was that I had jammed pack my life so full that there wasn't enough to find an extra two hours each day to crank out 1600 words.  I know that there are a lot of people who can do this, but I'm not one of them.  I'm neither well organized nor efficient, and I just can't get that much done in a day.

Now having said that, I'm still glad I went through the process.  In fact, even though I'm not going to finish, this month was invaluable in getting the ball rolling on Book Two.  I'm now over the beginning hump, and most of the plot points are now in place.  I'm no longer struggling with the the structure of the story, so it's much easier to pick up the laptop and just start writing.   Another difference is, I'm now more aware of what I did wrong in writing the first book (like, um, procrastinating and then rushing through the process…) and I want to avoid that with the second. 

In fact, the website allows you to just keep tracking your word count even after the month has ended, and I think I'll continue to do that.  Writing really is a lonely profession, and the beauty of a program like NaNoWriMo is that it holds you accountable.  It's no longer just me and my discipline battling it out in a room that doesn't overlook a peony garden. Instead, it’s a community of writers gently prodding and supporting each other, holding us accountable to just finish the damn book already.                                                                                       

How screenwriting is different from writing novels

I made a lot of mistakes in writing my first novel, but an inadvertent one had to do with the story's abrupt ending.

Now, unlike mistakes caused by carelessness (editing) or inexperience (the original book cover), this mistake was the result of being too experienced in a different genre---screenwriting.

In screenwriting, a writer has about 120 pages, or 120 minutes to tell their story.  This means that everything has to be distilled to its essence, and screenwriters strive to capture only the most emotionally impactful moments in any scene.  While novels also follow certain structures, they have an unlimited number of pages in which to do it. 

Films, on the other hand, have the most unrelenting editor of all:  time.  Few people will sit through a movie longer than two hours, and even fewer studios will consider reading anything longer than 140 pages.   Perhaps in no other medium is the approach so formulaic:  an inciting incident within the first ten pages, a set back by page thrty, a turning point on page sixty, the final set back on page ninety, and final resolution by page 120. 

In order to tell a complete story in this amount of time, screenwriters have to train themselves to think in terms of action rather than thoughts, impressions, or feelings.   Backstory is still important, but instead of ten or twenty pages showing a main character thinking, describing and remembering their troubled relationship with their mother, a script would summarize the conflict in a sentence or two or dialogue or description, and preferrably one that isn't even telling you about their relationship.  For example, "Camera PANS across her apartment, filled with lovingly framed pictures.  There isn't a single one of anyone related to her."   Done.  Twenty years of dysfunction in two sentences, without even a mention of the word mother.  This works in a script, but in a novel it would seem rushed, to say the least.  

There is even a phrase for when in the story a screenplay should begin:  in medea res, which means "into the middle of things".  Think of a Bond film.  The very first scene shows the hero in a car chase, escaping an underwater dungeon or free falling into the Hoover Dam.  Transport that same scene in novel form and a reader would flip to the Table of Contents, wondering if some pages had been truncated.

Then there are the endings, which are even more terse.  Once the golden elixir is found, the city is saved, the boy gets girl back---there's no point in lingering, and we immediately FADE TO BLACK.

Most of my writing experience is in writing for the screen---whether television or movies.  I knew novel writing was different; in fact, when I used to read screenplays for a production company, we could always spot the novelists because of the sheer amount of…words on their screenplay.   Some screenwriting gurus even recommend that any block of text in a screenplay longer than five lines be edited.  This seems absurd until you start reading scripts from films that were actually produced and realize that this is not only true for the most part, but it's one of the reasons the film succeeds.

Which leads me to the feedback I get the most:  that the story started too quickly and ended too abruptly.   I realize that this is true, and I'm writing about it now not as a way to make excuses, but as a way to remind myself that there is so much more to learn. 

Although now that it's been pointed out to me, I do wish I could re-write my book and flesh out the ending a little more…

Writing is an art.   Sublime writing IS art.  The most important thing will always be a great story creatively told.    My mistake (which I will correct with my next novel!) is in not respecting writing as a discipline---and experience in one genre doesn't necessarily carry over into another.