No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (3 page)

A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most ass-kicking form. It’s a potent force that, when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. This is especially true when it comes to creative pursuits.

Because in the artistic realms, deadlines do much more than just projects finished. They serve as creative midwives, as enthusiastic shepherds adept at plucking the timid inspirations that lurk in the wings of our imaginations and flinging them bodily into the bright light of day. The bigger the artistic project, the more it needs a deadline to keep marshaling those shy ideas out onto the world’s stage. Nowhere is this more true than in novel writing, when even people who know what they’re doing have trouble getting the things finished. Drafting a novel typically involves years of navigating a jungle of plots, subplots, supporting characters, tangents, symbols, and motifs. It’s an exhilarating trek at times, but it also involves long, long slogs, where chapters are built, dismantled, and rebuilt dozens of times. A single troublesome passage may stop the writing for years as the writer fusses and stews and waits for the way forward to become clear.

Writing on deadline changes that. Having an end-date for your quest through the noveling unknown is like bringing along a team of jetpack-wearing, entrepreneurial Sherpas. These energetic guides not only make passage easier through myriad formidable obstacles, but they’ll fly ahead and open coffeeshops and convenience stores along the route.

-------------------THIS DANGEROUS BLOODSPORT CALLED NOVEL WRITING

If you’ve spent any amount of time using a computer, you already know the range of sneaky, bloodthirsty ways they have of wrecking your body. Carpal tunnel syndrome, eye strain, back problems, numb-butt... the list of computer-inspired woes goes on and on. Because you’ll likely be racking up an extraordinary amount of keyboard time when you write your novel, you are going to be putting your body at high risk for damage. This is no joke: Take it easy on yourself by setting up an ergonomic writing station, making a point of taking stretching breaks, and calling it a night at the first sign of numbness. Several companies, such as Workpace.com and Rsiguard.com, offer free one-month trials (woo hoo!) of software that will lock up your computer at intervals chosen by you, and then lead you through on-screen stretching exercises. Look on the Web for eye exercises as well, and keep some eye drops on hand to ward off the inevitable dryness that comes from getting so wrapped up in your book that you forget to blink (a great sign for your story, but a notso-great sign for your poor eyeballs).

--------------------------------------WHY BRINGING A PARTIALLY COMPLETED BOOK INTO THIS IS NOT SUCH A GOOD IDEA In National Novel Writing Month, one of the fundamental rules of the game is that you must start your novel from scratch on Day One of the event. You can bring as many outlines and notes and character maps as you like, but writing any of the book’s actual prose in advance is forbidden. This rule is enforced by legions of invisible guilt-monkeys, which are unleashed every year against those who dare to break the rules.

While this costs NaNoWriMo a pretty penny annually in guilt-monkeys, it also keeps things fresh and exciting and helps prevent people from sabotaging their productivity by being overly invested in the outcome of their book.

If your writing frenzy is taking place outside of the tyrannical bounds of NaNoWriMo, guilt-monkeys will not descend should you choose to spend the month adding 50,000 words to a novel you’ve already started. Be warned, though, that a state of exuberant imperfection is hard to attain when you’ve set yourself the formidable task of building a suitable extension onto an earlier creation. The writing will be slower, the pain much greater, and the output will likely leave you disappointed. My strong advice is to come up with something new for this challenge. You’ll be happy you did.

A GOOD DEADLINE IS HARD TO FIND

The problem, as those of us who are forever grumbling about our uncreative lives know, is that rocksolid, dream-fostering deadlines are hard to come by in the arts world. It’s a sad irony that deadlines are given so freely at work (where we want them least), and are in such short supply in the extracurricular activities where we need them most.

Outside of writing classes, we never quite get the professional-grade push we need to tackle big, juicy, creative projects like novel writing. And who has time for classes? We’re slammed at work and busy at home. Throw in an occasional outing with friends or significant others, and we’re ready for bed at 10:00 P.M. every night. Really ready for bed. There’s barely enough time in a day to cover all our mandatory obligations, so optional activities like novel writing, journaling, painting, or playing music

—things that feel great but that no one will ever take us to task for shirking—are invariably left for another day.

Which is how most of us become “one day” novelists. As in, “One day, I’d really like to write a novel.”

The problem is that that day never seems to come, and so we’re stuck. Or we were stuck, anyway. Because as far as artistic deadlines go, this book comes with a doozy. The deadline that rules over this book with an iron fist is the ink-sensitive model #A30/31/50k. Once activated, it gives you just one month to write a 50,000-word rough draft of a novel. Plus, it hounds you every step of the way, forcing you to write when you don’t want to, badgering you into meeting daily word-count goals, and turning your life into an obsessive literary hell for four weeks. The #A30/31/50k will also foster one of the most intense and satisfying months of your life. In the thirty or thirty-one days you spend under its taskmastering thumb, you’ll discover wild, wonderful parts of yourself and tap into exciting realms of aptitude and achievement you didn’t know existed. You’ll fly and soar and laugh and sing, and the people who love you most will likely worry that you’ve gone crazy.

That’s okay. The insanity only lasts a month, just long enough to get “write a novel” checked off your to-do list. And then normal life, with its regular showers and reasonably clean apartments, can begin again. Should you decide to take your month-long novel and revise it to perfection later, you can do that. If not, you’ll still have experienced a creative month like no other. OKAY, ONE MONTH SOUNDS GOOD. BUT WHY 50,000 WORDS?

I’d like to say that NaNoWriMo’s 50,000-word threshold was achieved by a scientific assessment of the great short novels of our age. The real story is that when I started this whole month-long noveling escapade five years ago, I simply grabbed the shortest novel on my shelf—which happened to be Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—did a rough word count of it, and went with that figure. Over the years, though, 50,000 words has proven itself a good goal for a month’s labors. Writing 50,000 words in a month breaks down to about 1,667 words per day. Most average typists will be able to dispatch that in an hour and a half, which makes it doable, even for people with full-time jobs and chaotic home lives. Fifty thousand words is also just large enough for someone writing concisely to sketch an entire story arc within its borders.

And yet, despite its short stature, a 50,000-word novel is no cakewalk. Only about 17 percent of National Novel Writing Month participants reach the 50,000-word finish line every year, and some have argued that the number should be lowered.

I think the number is perfect. Because you’re covering so much ground, so quickly, the high number forces you to lower your expectations for your prose, to write for quantity over quality, and to stop being so hard on yourself. And this, for a first draft, is the pathway to genius.

-------------------ISN’T 50,000 WORDS MORE OF A NOVELLA?

While it’s true that 50,000 words makes for a short novel, it does not make what you are about to write a novella.

Novellas, as decreed by the World Literary Council in its precedent-setting 1956 ruling, are “weakwilled, half-hearted novels” that “lack the gumption to make it to 50,000 words,” which they very accurately describe as “the very precipice of novelhood.”

But mainly the reason to avoid describing your upcoming work as a novella is because it doesn’t impress people the way novel does. Remember: You’re writing a novel next month. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.

--------------------LOW EXPECTATIONS, HIGH YIELD

If your fiction is anything like mine, you have long since become accustomed to the concept of underachievement. Celebrating your writing inadequacies, though, will likely be a new and somewhat uncomfortable prospect. Give it a try when you write your novel next month. The most important mental preparation you can do for the noveling month ahead is to realize the following: There is no pressure on you to write a brilliant first draft. Because no one ever writes a brilliant first draft. It’s true. When your novel first peeks its head into the world, it will look pretty much like every newborn: pasty, hairless, and utterly confused. This is the case no matter how talented you are, or how long you take to coax the thing into existence. Novels are simply too long and complex to nail on the first go-round. Anyone who tells you differently is a superhuman literary cyborg, and should not be trusted.

I’m not making this up. Flip through books on writing by Stephen King or Anne Lamott, and they say the same thing (without, of course, the crucial insights on cyborgs). To quote the mild-mannered, mincing Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.”

It’s not just shit, though. It’s wonderful shit. A first draft is an anything-goes space for you to roll up your sleeves and make a terrific mess. It is a place where the writer’s battle plan is redrawn daily; a place where recklessness and risk-taking is rewarded, where half-assed planning and tangential writing can yield unexpectedly amazing results. It is, in short, a place for people like you and me. And when it comes to the topsy-turvy world of the rough draft, the law of the land is best summed up in two words: Exuberant imperfection.

EXUBERANT IMPERFECTION DEFINED

The first law of exuberant imperfection is essentially this: The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy. Like most things associated with writing a novel in a month, this may not make a lot of sense on the surface. But there’s proven psychology behind it. Namely, the older we get, the more scared we are to try new things. Especially things that might make us look stupid in public. (Women with boyfriends or husbands can see this in action by suggesting they take salsa dancing classes together.) The reason for this is that, as grown-ups, we come to place undue importance on this thing called

“competence.” From the work world, we’ve learned that the way to get ahead in life is to brandish proficiency and know-how at anything that moves—co-workers, bosses, customers, and so on. We do this for a very good reason: to keep from getting fired.

In the workplace, the emphasis on professionalism makes great sense. No one wants to have his or her cerebellum doctored by a dilettante brain surgeon. But the emphasis on mastery has certain unseen psychological ramifications on the rest of our lives. You’d think, for instance, that this workaday obsession with competence would make our weekends a refuge for floundering forays into uncharted territories.

But what do we do when we have free time? The tried-and-true activities we’ve already perfected. Like talking on the phone. Or walking up and down stairs. Or getting drunk. The times we do actually make a point of stepping out of our normal routine, we tend to get flustered when we don’t get the hang of it right away. This is especially true with artistic endeavors. At the first awkward line of prose or botched brushstroke, we hurriedly pack away the art supplies and scamper back to our comfortable domains of proficiency. Better a quitter than a failure, our subconscious reasoning goes. Exuberant imperfection allows you to circumvent those limiting feelings entirely. It dictates that the best way to tackle daunting, Paralysis-inducing challenges is to give yourself permission to make mistakes, and then go ahead and make them.

In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower bar from “best-seller” to “would not make someone vomit.” Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low. It sounds like a recipe for a disastrous novel, I know. But as you’ll discover when you start writing, lowered expectations don’t I necessarily translate into lowered quality. Exuberant imperfection is not a surefire path to bad writing so much as it is a necessary mental reshuffling, a psychological sleight-of-hand that takes the pressure off and helps you tolerate the drivel that greases the wheels of genius. In your first draft, the ratio of muck to mastery may be somewhat disappointing. But that’s just life as a draft-wranglin’ novelist. It will all get better in time. For now, quantity—not quality—is of primary importance.

And embracing exuberant imperfection will do much more than just help keep your word counts soaring in the coming month. By giving yourself the gift of imperfection, you tap into the realms of intuition and imagination that your hypercritical brain normally censors. These are the left-of-center dialogue exchanges and strange character quirks that end up forming the most memorable and delightful parts of your novel.

This torrent of thoughts and ideas is exhilarating and scary, and absolutely, absolutely essential to getting a first draft written in such a short amount of time.

-------------------EXTRACURRICULAR FORAYS INTO EXUBERANT IMPERFECTION

Lowering your unrealistically high standards for your writing can be achieved more easily if you practice it in other life domains as well. In the coming weeks, loosen your control over your life. Sing off-key in public. Tell jokes, even if you can’t exactly remember the punchlines. Stop proofreading the emails you send to friends. Try your hand at something you’ve long thought you might like but fear you’ll be bad at. You’ll probably feel uncomfortable and exposed at first, but you’ll also find that the world is a lot more fun when you approach it with an exuberant imperfection.