No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (14 page)

STORM CLOUDS, PLOT FLASHES, AND THE RETURN OF REALITY (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 16,670 words]

WEEK TWO TIPS

“DON’T GET IT RIGHT, GET IT WRITTEN”: MAKING DECISIONS IN WEEK TWO

When asked for the most important piece of first-draft writing insight she’s ever received, Edgar Award–winning mystery writer Julie Smith quoted some advice from her newspaper days. “Don’t get it right, Smith,” a gruff editor had told her. “Get it written.”

That advice looms large over Week Two, and it is something to keep in mind as you decide what to do with all these characters that have taken up residency in your book. The variety of directions a book can take are a little daunting. Do you kill someone off? Burn down a house? Fling a character into space via intergalactic wormhole?

In deciding what should happen next in your book, know that all plot points lead to the same happy place: getting a complete draft of your novel done. You aren’t shooting for perfection here; you’re just exploring the outer reaches of your imagination, and building a book one day at a time. Don’t worry about getting it right this week. That will come in the revisions. This week, your goal is just to get it written.

THE MIND IS WILLING, THE IMMUNE SYSTEM WEAK: AVOIDING PATHOGENS AND

OTHER ENEMIES OF FINE LITERATURE

Colds, flus, and other opportunistic viruses are the failed writers of the microbe world. They have a good story to tell, but they lack the drive, discipline, and typing appendages to get the stories down on paper. Like most stymied creative types, they’ll stop at nothing to bring down the brave few who dare to seize their dreams.

Because of this, you should guard your health very, very carefully from this point forward. Especially if you’ve been sleeping four hours a night and eating most of your meals at Taco Bell. Wash your hands with soap every time you pass a faucet. Eat as many fruits and vegetables as you can stomach. Start stirring vitamin C into your coffee or whiskey shots. And if you are in a public space—

such as a restaurant or an airplane cabin—and someone begins coughing, flee immediately. Your body will thank you, and your novel will thank you, too.

THE CHECK-IN: STAYING IN TOUCH WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE TIME TO WRITE

On days when you don’t have the time or energy for a full writing session, you can help keep your word debt low with quick writing sessions I call Check-Ins. These are noveling quickies where you just poke your head into your novel for twenty minutes or so, add a pinch of color here, an embellishment there, and then call it a night after 500 words or so.

It may seem like a pitiful drop in the bucket, but every word you write is one less you’ll have to tackle the next day. The main point of a Check-In, though, is to help you maintain a creative connection to your book so your imagination will continue to nibble away at the story until you sit down for the next full blown write-in.

WEEK TWO, DAY 11

STORM CLOUDS, PLOT FLASHES, AND THE RETURN OF REALITY (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 18,337 words]

WEEK TWO EXERCISES

GETTING ON YOUR CASE: HOW FRIENDS AND FAMILY CAN HELP PLOT YOUR NOVEL

In the business school world, the teaching of proper management is partly done through nifty things called business cases. These are swashbuckling tales of the exploits of managers and employees at companies where change (or the lack thereof) is threatening the well-being of the organization. Business cases lead students through the who and where of the story right up to the point when a strategic decision needs to be made to decide the fate of the company. And then the MBA students must debate what they’d do if they were in the CEO’s or middle manager’s shoes. The same teaching aid that’s transformed mild-mannered graduate students into ruthless, bloodthirsty entrepreneurs can also be harnessed to help you gain new insights on your book. This week, try making a business case out of your novel.

Here’s how it works: Ask a couple of friends who enjoy the same kinds of books you do to meet with you for an hour (you can heighten the Fortune 500 mood by dressing in corporate duds and bringing your notes in a briefcase). Then, once everyone’s comfortable, hand out some scratch paper and pens, and explain the ground rules: You are going to give them a handful of characters, a setting, and a veeery vague story direction, and they are to tell you what should happen next. Explain everything you know about your characters, one by one—where they work, who they love, what they’re embarrassed by, and so on. Encourage your story students to jot down questions and ideas as they occur to them, but be sure to emphasize that this is a brainstorming session, not a test; there are no right or wrong story directions.

After you’ve completely described all of your characters and their connections to each other, your job is to get the conversational ball rolling and then become invisible. Let your audience argue, debate, and build off one another’s ideas as you take notes on everything they say. Even if you already know what will happen in your book, you’ll get amazing insights on motivations, subplots, and other nefarious activities that might make your book more interesting.

When your focus group inevitably asks what you think should happen in the story, be sure to keep your ideas a mystery. As mentioned in chapter five, revealing your book’s plot before it’s written can end up sapping a lot of the joy from the writing process, especially if your focus group has a tepid reaction to it

—or thinks it stinks. Just keep scribbling down notes and ideas, and let them know that all will be revealed when the book comes out in hardback.

INCITING PLOT FLASHES

No one has better encapsulated the spirit of month-long noveling than three-time NaNoWriMo winner Rise Sheridan-Peters, who describes her approach to writing as follows: “I don’t wait for my muse to wander by; I go out and drag her home by the hair.”

With time being of the essence this month, any hairy handhold you can use to hurry your novel along should be exploited. And certain activities work much better than others to stimulate the copious “aha!”

breakthrough moments you’ll have during your noveling month. I call these moments “plot flashes,”

and inconveniently, most of them occur while you’re faraway from a keyboard. For me, common sites for plot flashes include hot showers, dance clubs, and long bike rides. For some reason, creative juices just percolate better when accompanied by routine, automatic motions. When I set out on my bike for a five-mile ride, I know that I’ll come home with invaluable material I didn’t have before. Which is also why I take a notebook and pen out every time I go dancing. Other NaNoWriMo winners recommend crapping, walking a dog, jumping on a bed, and flitting around at the edge of sleep as possible doorways to plot flashes. Try all of these and more this week, and see if any help you unleash your imagination.

WEEK TWO, DAY 12

STORM CLOUDS, PLOT FLASHES, AND THE RETURN OF REALITY (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 20,004 words]

-------------------SO YOU WANT TO START OVER: A WARNING ABOUT DIVORCING YOUR NOVEL AND

RUNNING OFF WITH A NEW STORY

Everyone, at some point, sees their novel as a lost cause. The characters are one-dimensional. The plot isn’t going anywhere. The language is abysmal. For month-long novelists, this moment typically occurs in Week Two, when the general unhappiness about the hours you’ve been keeping and the challenges of plot improvisation make even the most promising story look like a disaster. The thing to remember even in the darkest moments is that there is something great and workable in your story. Rather than starting over entirely, the best approach is usually to focus on the book’s strengths—the characters or parts of the storyline you are enjoying—and let the story take off from there.

--------------------------------------AXE-MURDERERS AND SELF-DECEPTION: AVOIDING THE DEMON PLAGUE OF SELFEDITING

“The best trick I’ve learned is to lie to myself. When, in chapter seven, I write something that contradicts something written earlier, I tell myself that I already made the necessary corrections in chapter three. I just tell myself that the earlier parts are the way I need them to be for me to write something that day which builds on them.”

—Russell Kremer, 51, three-time NaNoWriMo winner from Los Angeles

“Imagine the pages you have written to be an axe-wielding maniac, hellbent on massacring your creative flow. Get away from those pages as quickly as possible. Don’t worry how awkwardly or clumsily you do so. The very life of your book is at stake. As soon as you look back over previous pages, the doom will be upon you.”

—Trena Taylor, 34, two-time NaNoWriMo winner from London

“I write parts of my novels as emails. I simply open up Outlook or Yahoo! Main or whatever, address it to myself, and just start writing. Something about the rhetorical situation of email writing keeps my internal censor and editor quiet (or quieter at least).”

—Ed Chang, 33, three-time NaNoWriMo winner from Washington, D.C.

--------------------WEEK TWO, DAY 13

STORM CLOUDS, PLOT FLASHES, AND THE RETURN OF REALITY (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 21,671 words]

-------------------CHEAP PADDING TECHNIQUES: EASY TRICKS FOR GETTING YOUR WORD COUNT UP

WHEN YOU’RE FEELING DOWN

There will be times in your writing journey when you want to crawl under the nearest boulder, curl up, and die. These moments will pass, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and there are a host of word-count-increasing tricks that well-seasoned month-long novelists use to help pad their novels (and warm their spirits) in these dark hours.

Here are some of the old standbys:

The stutter: Afflict one of your characters with a stutter, and it doubles the girth of their dialogue, and it also allows the supporting cast to spend several pages wondering in great, word-count bolstering detail about the sudden, mysterious onset of the speech impediment.

Temporary deafness: Everything from loud rock concerts to small deposits of earwax can temporarily render your character deaf, necessitating that everything said to him or her be repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

The dream sequence: Our dreams might as well come with a sign that says, “Free words: Help yourself.” The dream sequence (and its cousin, the hallucination) go on for as long as you like and don’t have to make any sense whatsoever. It’s the motherlode!

The citation: If your character can read, you can cite. Give your protagonist a copy of Beowulf and an annoying habit of reading poetry out loud on their long commute to work, and you’ve suddenly added thousands of words to your count. This also works with songs, newspaper articles, and—gulp—other novels.

The extended name: Okay, say your protagonist is named Jane. Every occurrence of Jane’s name only nets you a single tick on the word counter. Now let’s say you use the find-and-replace function on your word processor to change “Jane” to “Jane Marie.” Presto! You’ve doubled your investment. This works especially well in fantasy novels, where a low-yield name like Hrudon can, with a single find-andreplace search, become “Hrudon, Son of Sankar, Prince and Overlord of Outer Cthandon.”

De-hyphenate: Word-processing programs tend to count hyphenated words as a single unit. “Lillylivered” is just one word; “not-quite-as-potent-as-promised fungicide” counts as only two words. Deleting your hyphens may lose you grammar points, but it will definitely gain you words when you’re too tired to write any new ones.

--------------------WEEK TWO, DAY 14

STORM CLOUDS, PLOT FLASHES, AND THE RETURN OF REALITY (CONT'D)

[Today's Goal: Reach 23,338 words]

-------------------OBSESSIVE COUNTING DISORDER

Psychologists have a term for people who perform small gestures and rituals over and over again uncontrollably: obsessive-compulsive disorder. Month-long novelists who don’t already have OCD will be getting a crash course in the mental illness thanks to the “word count” feature built into most word processors. Nothing is more alluring than pulling up a tally of your progress as you type, and you’ll likely find yourself checking your word count after every paragraph. Assessing your progress after every couple of lines, though, is like checking the odometer every five minutes on a thousand-mile road trip—knowing how far you’ve gone does nothing to get you there faster, and it makes the journey seem interminably slow. One way to get around this is to structure your writing around units of time rather than numbers of words, and then make word counting a reward you earn at the end of each noveling session.

--------------------------------------USING EMAIL TO MAKE FREE BACKUPS OF YOUR NOVEL

Computers, unfortunately, go belly-up all the time. Protect yourself from being one of the sad, sad novelists who lose their best work when their operating system dissolves by making frequent backups of your novel. The best way to do this is simply to email your novel to yourself as an attachment every few days, leaving the email unopened on the server until the next backup arrives. Hopefully you’ll never need to access the novel attachment, but just in case you do, it’s there.

CHAPTER 7

WEEK THREE, DAY 15

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

[Today's Goal: Reach 25,005 words]

Dear Writer,

Welcome to Week Three! If last week was a stormy trek through ice-slicked mountain passes, Week Three is . . . well . . . nicer. Much nicer.

You’ve survived the most difficult part of the month. You still have a lot of work ahead, but the weather is more forgiving in Week Three, and the landscape softer. In the amiable confines of Week Three, gentle woodland creatures will begin appearing along the trail’s edge, chanting your name, extending trays of nutrient-rich acorns and hollowed gourds brimming with Gatorade. Or at least let’s hope it’s Gatorade.

Anyway, you should drink it all in. For this is the week when you begin to head downhill, when the beautiful, bucolic patch of earth called The End first becomes visible. To get the most out of Week Three, there are two things you must do: