No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (18 page)

But as soon as the deadline lifts, my connection to that fantasy world is lost, and the real world comes rushing in. As you come down off your writer’s high this week, you too will be deluged with an array of chores and errands; the everyday must-dos that you’ve been so rightly putting off for the past month to focus on your writing.

Your immediate instinct when faced with such a bewildering array of stimulus may be similar to mine: to retreat into your novel; to block out the world and burrow back into the comfortably snug confines of your fictional world.

Don’t do it.

Despite what you may have learned last month, sustained writing is best accomplished as part of a balanced lifestyle, one that includes things like grocery shopping and speaking in complete sentences with your significant other. No matter how dreadful it seems, you should take a vacation from your novel, for at least a couple of weeks, to get some balance back in your life and to get some perspective on what you just wrote.

Trust me: The novel is going to be right there waiting for you when you get back. Right now, your friends, family, and creditors are calling. Spend the coming month getting reacquainted with the essential distractions that you successfully avoided during the last one. And when all of that is done, when calm has been regained, when you’ve gotten a little objective distance from your manuscript, then you will be ready for the next awesome experience: reading it. SECTION TWO, CHAPTER 9: I WROTE A NOVEL. NOW WHAT? (CONT'D)

TURNING THE PAGES AND MAKING THE CALL

After some well-deserved R&R, make a date with your novel. Set aside an entire evening for just the two of you. No phone calls, no visitors, and no red pens to catch spelling mistakes. You’re going to spend a couple of hours just getting reacquainted with your book.

Chances are, in reading over the manuscript, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It won’t be that bad at all, especially for a month’s labors. Then, when you’ve finished reading it, first page to last, ask yourself the following question: Do I want to devote a year of my life to making it better?

The answer may be no. And that’s an okay answer. No Plot? No Problem! is as much a guide to recharging your imagination as it is a path toward book production. With our busy lives, we have to pick our battles, and there’s every chance that you just won’t like the book you wrote enough to wrangle it into shape.

Two of the five novels I’ve written fit into this category. The first time it happened, I was devastated. It was my second NaNoWriMo, and I made the mistake I describe in chapter two, one common amongst second-year participants: I got overly ambitious with my characters, and I allowed all sorts of depressing nonsense from my Magna Carta II list to sneak in.

The next year, I thought I had learned my lesson, but once again I waded knee-deep into the trough of failure. This time I kept the characters on such a tight rein that the book ended up feeling claustrophobic and overwritten, plagued with a lack of action and a jaw-dropping amount of filler. With back-to-back noveling failures to my credit, “exuberant imperfection” started seeming less like a panic-free way to get monumental tasks accomplished and more like a surefire way to make me feel like a moron. Not caring if I wrote crap and stumbling into passable prose was exhilarating. Not caring if I wrote crap and getting exactly that for two years in a row was demoralizing. Just as I was about to drop my laptop into a trash compactor, though, a friend of mine sent me some quotes from the celebrated graphic designer Bruce Mau. One of which struck pretty close to home.

“Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child),” Mau’s maxim went. “Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.”

As corny as it sounds, those words changed the way I looked at my two crapulent works of fiction. As literature, they were ugly as sin. As experiments, though, they were packed with a beautiful, useful array of wrong turns, misguided decisions, and shameful flops. From those experiments, I discovered copious amounts about what I shouldn’t be writing. This allowed me to spend my fourth and fifth novels in the happy pursuit of what I should.

Inspiration and insight, I’ve learned, flow more freely from failures than they do from successes. Even if your novel is beyond editorial salvation, your imagination has gotten a great work out, and you’ll likely have a much easier time on whatever creative challenge you tackle next. And if your answer is yes, you would like to revise your manuscript to perfection—well, roll up those sleeves and read on.

-------------------GETTING A SECOND OPINION

Having someone else critique your novel can be either immensely helpful or a discouraging waste of time, depending on who you ask. If you’d like a second opinion on what works and what doesn’t in your book before you start the rewrite, here are some tips to keep in mind: Choose someone whose literary tastes are similar to yours. This is absolutely essential. Yes, good stories transcend genre. But at this stage in the game, you want to put your book in the hands of someone who understands and loves the kind of story you wrote. Not only will the person better appreciate and enjoy your book, his or her critique will be more knowledgeable and appropriate to what you need.

Choose a tactful, diplomatic reader. Even the thickest-skinned writer is going to be shaking when it comes time to hear The Verdict from a reader. Choose someone you trust to be both honest and kind. You don’t want your first review to leave you wanting to abandon writing forever. Tell the person what you want critiqued. Should the reader look for typos? Clichés? Big-picture things?

Are you worried that your dialogue sounds stilted? Let your reader know exactly what you want his or her opinion on, so you get the right feedback.

Listen. Then, when The Verdict comes, listen, take notes, and stifle your impulse to argue or explain anything. Just ask as many questions as you can, and try to get your reader to talk as much as possible about everything in the book, from the chapter lengths to his or her favorite scenes.

--------------------------------------CREATING A NOVEL BLOOPERS FILE

Just as one of the first things you did when you started writing was to create a “Novel Notes” file on your computer, so should you now create a “Novel Cuts” file. Use this as the home for every deletion longer than a couple of sentences. You might change your mind about that deleted scene later, and you’ll also want to have the unexpurgated version of the book on hand when the biographers come sniffing around your estate in a couple of decades.

--------------------WHITTLING THE STUMP: THE KNOTTY ISSUES OF REWRITING

Rewriting is when your novel—the version that people will fight one another for in bookstores—is born. What you spent the last thirty days creating amounts to a large, knotty wooden stump. It’s a powerful, brute object, and it’s absolutely amazing that you conjured such a dense mass out of thin air. But it’s also likely too unwieldy at this point to take outside the home. In the editing process, that stump will get whittled into a lithe, diabolical instrument that will eventually leave literary agents clutching their hearts in fear and wonder.

Making the myriad tweaks, fixes, and alterations necessary to get your book up to bookstore quality is a huge, challenging project. When you realize that most novels on the bookstore shelf were not rewritten once but numerous times, you will begin to see why even the youngest professional novelists have the skittish, prematurely aged appearance of people who have endured a lifetime of unspeakable tragedies.

The good news, though, is that the difficulties of rewriting are absolutely worth it, and that taking your novel from the rough draft stage to the shining, breathtaking end product will delight and devastate you just as intensely as the rough draft did, if not more so.

TRADING CHAINSAWS FOR DENTAL PICKS (AND THE RETURN OF A FAMILIAR SECRET

WEAPON)

In my experience, the basic key to editing is this: Slow down. This is especially true for those of us who spent a month writing their rough draft at literary Warp Factor Ninety. If you attack your second draft with the same reckless zeal that you used to such triumphant effect on your first draft, you’ll end up hurtling right past almost all of the fine-tunings and microadjustments that your second draft needs. This reduced pace will feel excruciating at first, especially because you know you have so much ground to cover. But by its nature it’s painstaking, brow-furrowing work, and it’s meant to be taken one page at a time. The days of the chainsaw are over; from here on out, we’ll be using small, diamond blades and dental picks.

Oh, and a secret weapon.

Unlike the devilish device you met in chapter one—the dead-line—this writing aid is actually an old acquaintance of yours. One we’ve been keeping locked up in our kennels for the past month. Yes, your Inner Editor is ready to come home.

I know, I know: This is not the greatest news. You’ve been doing just fine without all the nit-picking, second-guessing, and perfectionist carping that you’ve come to expect from your Inner Editor. However, only your Inner Editor can help you spot all the improvements your novel needs. And besides, your Inner Editor’s stay in the kennel has done it a world of good. It’s mellowed and tanned; it’s become, dare I say it, a kinder, gentler Inner Editor. Frankly, I think you doing such fantastic work without its help has humbled it a little bit.

So the caustic, biting days are over. From here on out, the criticism will be (mostly) constructive, and I think you two would make an excellent team on this upcoming project. So you ready to have it back?

----------------------------------------| GIVE ME BACK MY INNER EDITOR |

----------------------------------------Just touch the button, and it’s yours. Now let’s dive into that rewrite.

-------------------A WRITER, RECHARGED, BY GAYLE BRANDEIS

I had always been an in-the-flow writer. I could sit down and let the words pour. Then, in 2002, I became an “author.” The transition from being a writer who blissfully gushed words to being a published author with a sudden awareness of audience was more complicated than I had anticipated. It was a wonderful and gratifying transition, but I also felt the new weight of expectation, the pressures of a fickle market. It took some of the joy out of my process. I began to feel more self-conscious, more blocked, as I wrote. My first book was Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write. It felt kind of ironic to be talking to people about the juiciness of writing when my own writing life was drier than it had ever been.

While I was on my book tour, I found out that my novel, The Book of Dead Birds, had won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction and would be published the following year by HarperCollins. While this news was beyond thrilling it served to hamper my natural creative flow even more. How could my work ever live up to such accolades?

Then a friend told me about NaNoWriMo. I figured it was worth a shot–I thought that if I forced myself to write something that fast, it would be liberating; I wouldn’t have time to worry about how good my work was, wouldn’t have to worry about anyone peering over my shoulder. And that’s exactly what happened. Plowing forward blindly loosened me up. Writing became fun and free-flowing again. And my beloved characters from The Book of Dead Birds started speaking to me again. The work that was born that November recharged me like an electric shock.

When I was on tour for The Book of Dead Birds, my mother-in-law’s husband, Jack, was diagnosed with brain cancer, and I flew home early to be with the family. On the plane, I was feeling too upset to talk with anyone, but the woman next to me cajoled me into conversation. She had just lost a brother to brain cancer, so we had a lot to talk about. She also mentioned that she went to auctions at self-storage places and sold her winnings at yard sales. I had never heard of such a practice, and I found myself intrigued. Sadly, Jack died the following week We were still deep in mourning by the time November rolled around. I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the plane and her stories of self-storage auctions, so I decided to use that as the seed for my 2003 NaNoWriMo endeavor. I felt Jack’s presence in every word I wrote.

I am happy to say that the resulting novel, Self Storage, is going to be published by Ballantine in 2007

as part of a two book deal. Of course, I dedicated the book to Jack. Not only did NaNoWriMo bring my writing back to life; it is helping me keep the memory of a wonderful man alive as well.

--------------------THE BIG PICTURE: FINDING YOUR STORY ARC

First, grab your printout and a nice, friendly pen. Choose a color other than red, like purple or green. Now read each chapter in order and, in the margins at the start of each one, jot down the following: 1) The characters who appear

2) The action that occurs

Some examples of these margin notes might be: “Chapter Two: This is where we meet Phil, the main love interest, in all his idiotic glory, and where we learn that Amy is unhappy with her imminent arranged marriage to Thaddeus Morgenheimer, King of the Orangutans.”

Or: “Chapter Four: This is where the protagonist learns, through the mandatory drug screening at the Pizza Hut, that Bill has a rare form of leprosy, and he gets the idea that he can enlist the aid of a latenight TV psychic to cure himself.”

What you are doing with this review is clarifying your novel’s current structure, to see how your book’s interrelated plots and subplots play out across the chapters. As you take your inventory of your characters and their actions, you should do so with the cold, dispassionate eye of a mechanic seeing a prototype car for the first time. At this point, all you’re trying to do is understand how the machine works; improving the performance of the engine, and adding the all-important racing stripes and fender detailing, will come later.

-------------------HOW I EDITED MY MONTH-LONG MANUSCRIPT INTO A TWO-BOOK DEAL WITH

WARNER BOOKS, BY LANI DIANE RICH