Each year, The Office of Letters and Light sponsors an Internet-based challenge called National Novel Writing Month (or “NaNoWriMo” for short). If you’ve ever thought about writing a novel, or if you’ve tried to do it before and failed, I’d encourage you to check out their site and participate in the next NaNoWriMo challenge. In this post, I am going to share with you the tips and tricks that helped me to complete the NaNoWriMo challenge successfully, and what I’ve learned in doing so.
Speed is of the Essence
To complete the NaNoWriMo challenge, you absolutely MUST resist the urge to go back and edit anything you’ve written before. Any time you spend rewriting your work is time you’re taking away from the goal of cranking out additional words. Remember, once the challenge is over, you have all the time in the world to go back and make your words better. But if you don’t have them written there is nothing to make better.
So, how do you resist the urge to go back and rewrite? These are the tools and techniques that worked for me, and may help you:
- Before you start, brainstorm. Get to know your characters, the locations they’ll be in, and have a basic idea for how they’ll get from start to finish. I have a list of many free open source tools and commercial fiction writing tools on this site. (Remember, these are just tools. Use them to enhance your writing process – not tell you what to write and how to write it. It’s your novel, after all.)
- Create a “revision log” that stores all the changes you want to go back and make later. Once you make a note in the log, keep writing as though the revision has already been made.
- Use “placeholder text” for any person, place, or object names you haven’t figured out yet. Later, you can “find and replace” that placeholder text with the name you decide on. If you feel like it’s essential that you have something named before you move on, remember that there are a lot of “name generators” on the web that can help you.
- Plot out your novel in a “modular” way to make it easy to restructure and reorganize later. Write in “scenes” rather than chapters, where a “scene” is defined as a specific group of characters in a specific place, doing a specific thing. If the location, group, or activity changes, it’s a new scene.
- Use a novel-writing tool like Scrivener, yWriter, NewNovelist, Storybook, or any of dozens of other fiction writing tools designed for the purpose. I found that with Scrivener I could store my revision log in the same project file as my novel, so I could easily add to it as I went.
- Realize that you’re only writing your first draft. Like any first draft, it’s probably going to stink. That’s OK. You’re the only one who has to read it right now. And no one will ever read it if you don’t get it written.
I’m going to expand on the above points a bit, to help you understand what I mean. Feel free to skip the rest of this article or scan down to the points that interest you.
Brainstorming
When I started writing my NaNoWriMo 2009 novel, I had only the vaguest idea how the story would go. My writing was sort of a “fictional stream of consciousness” from the starting point. As plot ideas came to me, I incorporated them. When I decided they were clichés, I abandoned them. The finished piece was, well, crap. But, I did meet my goal of 50,000 words of fiction in a month.
For 2010, I was determined to do better. I found a copy of Dramatica Pro for sale on eBay, and managed to snag it for $35. It’s normally around a $200 program, so this was a major steal. I spent as much spare time as I could stand with the software through September and October, telling it about the characters I envisioned, the story I was hoping to tell, etc. When I finally hit the end of its brainstorming process at the end of October, I had around 12,000 words of background material on the characters, their relationships, the story lines, etc.
I’m not suggesting that you need to run out and spend money on writing software. Here are some less expensive solutions if you don’t have the money (or desire) to invest in a software product:
- “How to Write a Damn Good Novel” by James N. Frey was one of the first books I read on the subject, and is still one of my favorites. You may find a copy in your local library, a used bookstore, or a friend’s bookshelf.
- “How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II” by James N. Frey expands on the first book and offers additional material.
- “Fiction Writer’s Workshop” by Josip Novakovich contains a number of exercises to help you find and expand on ideas.
- “Beginnings, Middles & Ends” by Nancy Kress provides some good advice.
- Although it’s not specifically about novel writing, J. Michael Straczynski’s “The Complete Book of Scriptwriting” includes a wealth of good writing tips.
- Discuss your story idea with friends, especially those who are avid readers. If they tell you your story idea reminds them of something they’ve already read, think about how you can twist the idea so that it no longer resembles the story they read.
- Visit your local library and talk to the librarians. Some libraries offer writing workshops and programs that might help you.
- Use the web! Here are a few links I’ve found interesting (there are more in the “Writing Resources” area of this site):
o [io9.com] “The 5 laws of making a story complicated without creating an ungodly mess” by Charlie Jane Anders
o [suite101.com] “How to Create a Plot for a Novel” by Suzanne Pitner
o [creative-writing-now.com] “Tips for Writing a Novel: So You’ve Got an Idea — What Now?” by William Victor
o [musik-therapie.at] “Learn the Elements of a Novel”
I’m sure you can find many more. Consider the above just a starting point.
Creating and Using a Revision Log
If you’ve read many books or articles on novel writing, you’ve probably seen some version of the advice “Write your way through to the end without stopping.” This is good advice in general, but it’s absolutely critical in a deadline situation like NaNoWriMo. Unfortunately, as you start writing your book, you will invariably think of things that should be different in the parts you’ve already written. Maybe your main character should be female instead of male, maybe the setting should a space station rather than a train station, or maybe your heroine should have two brothers instead of a sister. The temptation is to go back and rewrite those earlier parts to make those sweeping changes. If you keep a revision log, you can discipline yourself to let go of that need to change things.
Imagine that you’ve been writing a story about a man who travels to Europe and meets the love of his life there. About ten chapters in, you realize that there are some great things you could do with this story if only your main character was a woman. What do you do? Open up your revision log. Leave yourself a note like “Fred should really be a woman. In chapters 1-10, rewrite Fred to Jane and set up the fact that Jane was robbed at gunpoint in the airport before coming to Europe.”
Now, close the revision log and write as though you’ve already made those changes. From the next word you write until the end of the book, start writing “Jane” where you were writing “Fred” and refer to the robbery as though you had written it in from the beginning.
When you finish the first draft, open up your revision log and go back to make the changes needed to properly tell your story. Rather than chewing up your deadline time going back and rewriting words (which won’t add to your word count or get you any closer to the end of your tale), just keep writing and trust yourself to go back to make the necessary changes once your first draft is written.
Yes, not making the revisions as you go means that there can be huge inconsistencies in your novel at the end of the first draft. But that’s OK. It’s a first draft. No one has to read it but you, and you can always make the changes later before you show it to anyone. (And you can still call that updated version a first draft if you want to, if that makes you feel better.)
Using Placeholder Text
Something I struggled with in both of my NaNoWriMo novels was naming the characters and places in the story. No matter what name I came up with, I just didn’t like it. Even going through the lengthy plotting process in Dramatica, I just couldn’t seem to think of good names for my characters and locations. Finally, I told myself “We’ll plug those in later” and moved on.
Anywhere I needed to refer to a character I hadn’t named, I used placeholder text like “[Village]” for the name of the main character’s home town, which I had pictured as a small village. When I later settled on the name “Estervale”, I had the word processor replace “[Village]” with “Estervale” throughout the document. The resulting text makes it look like I had that name in mind from the beginning.
The key to using Placeholder Text is to make sure that you mark it in a way that uses spelling or punctuation that you wouldn’t normally use in the story. For my example above, it is possible I might have used the word “village” in the story to refer generically to a village. By surrounding the placeholder with brackets (“[]”) I could ensure that my find-and-replace method replaced only the placeholder text and not every occurrence of the word “village” in my story. If you planned to use brackets in your story, use some other punctuation mark instead. Or, if you want to leave your options completely open, make your placeholder text unique – like “InsertVillageName” or some other string you know you won’t use in the story.
And be sure to list these placeholders in your Revision Log to remind you what they are and that you need to go back to fix them later.
“Modular Plotting”
In one of the fiction writing seminars I have attended, the presenter defined the word “scene” as he saw it. The definition condensed to “A group of one or more characters, in a specific location, doing a specific thing, over a specific period of time.” By his definition, if you had three characters in their living room, trimming a Christmas tree, and one of them left the room, you had a new scene. If the three characters stay in the room, but finish trimming the tree and start making cookies, that’s a new scene. At the time, I thought this was splitting hairs, and a lot of extra work.
As it turns out, it’s really rather logical, fairly easy to do, and has one very useful benefit. Your entire story becomes “modular”. Imagine you aren’t using the concept of scenes as I’ve described here. Instead, you’ve written a chapter of your book where three characters trim a Christmas tree, bake cookies, and go caroling.
Farther along in your writing, you realize that the cookie baking activities should really take place much earlier in the story, perhaps two or three chapters earlier. If you’ve written the story chapter-by-chapter, you’ll have to read through the chapter until you get to the cookie baking part, cut it out of the story, clean up the text before and after it, paste it into the earlier chapter, then adjust the text before and after it. It’s not big deal, but it could have gone much easier if you’d written the story in a modular fashion.
In the “modular” version of the above story, you have separate “scenes” for the tree trimming, cookie baking, and caroling activities. Each scene could be stored in a separate file, or a separate element in your preferred writing tool. When you realize that you want the cookie scene to appear sooner in the story, all you have to do is move that file earlier into the book. You might need to adjust the start and end of the file to blend into the new location, but you probably won’t have to change anything in the scenes before and after it. The scenes are “modular” in nature and can be shifted about as needed.
The Scrivener software lends itself very well to this modular approach. So would the open source Storybook software. All of these allow you to have a “master document” with “sub-documents” that you can move about as needed.
This approach could also be used with the traditional “index card” method where each card represents a specific scene. The writer can shuffle the cards into any order to tell the story in the desired way.
Novel Writing Tools
Because I’m still a fledgling, unpublished, newbie author, I realize that there is a lot I don’t know about how to write a good story. For me, using tools like Dramatica helps me to think my story through before I sit down to write it. But just as important as plotting out the story is the tool you use to help you enter and organize your words.
For NaNoWriMo 2009, I used Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org and they were fine. I got the job done, and hit my 50,000 words without a problem. After beating the challenge that year, I received a discount coupon for the Scrivener software for the Macintosh. I ran through the tutorials provided with it and realized it was a good fit for the way I wrote. I bought a copy. Then, as ridiculous as it might seem, I bought a MacBook so that I could have the software with me when I traveled. Up that point, I hadn’t owned or used a Mac for about 10 years.
Just prior to starting NaNoWriMo 2010, I found out that they are working on a Windows compatible version of Scrivener. Since my primary desktop computer is a Windows 7 machine, this was good news. I downloaded and used the beta to write my 2010 story, and I’ve been very happy with the software. (I have a review of Scrivener for Windows available.)
I created separate “Texts” (think of them as text files) for each scene in my story. Into each of these text files, I pasted the text from my Dramatica brainstorming about what I wanted to accomplish in that scene. When November 1 rolled around and NaNoWriMo began, I opened up each text file and started writing the scene I had described in the notes. When I was finished, I deleted the notes.
By organizing each text file around a specific scene, I was able to move events in the story to earlier or later parts of the book by simply clicking and dragging them in the Scrivener window. This made it much easier for me to restructure parts of the narrative on the fly without actually having to do any revision.
When I have the story in Scrivener the way I want it, I can have the software “Compile” all those text files in order into a finished manuscript file.
I was also able to create a “Research” folder that contained information about the characters, locations, and story points I wanted to make. I also included a Revision Log among those documents, which I updated as I continued to write. (Items in the research folder are not included in the draft that Scrivener compiles for you.)
Below is a screenshot of Scrivener in action, with a portion of my NaNoWriMo 2010 book open in it.
Scrivener Text View
In the left-hand pane of this window, you can see that I’ve got a separate text document for each scene in the novel. The center pane is the word processor built into Scrivener, in which you can see the text for the scene “Kevin is attacked”. In the upper-right pane, I have the “index card” telling me the name of the scene and a brief description of what happens in it. Below that, I’ve labeled this document as a “Scene” and indicated that it is in “First Draft” status. Additional notes can be entered into the “Document Notes” section if I need more than the Index card holds.
By clicking and dragging any of the text files in the left-hand pane, I can move the corresponding scene earlier or later in my story line. There is also an “index card” view that allows me to reorganize the story using a virtual version of paper index cards.
Scrivener Corkboard View
Since this isn’t a review of the software, I’m not going to go into great detail about it here. Suffice it to say that I found Scrivener very helpful and intuitive for my particular writing style. It may or may not be helpful for yours.
Other similar tools you might want to consider include Spacejock Software’s free yWriter 5 software, which includes features for organizing scenes, project notes, characters, locations, and items – as well as writing your story.
Spacejock Software's yWriter 5
The open source “Storybook” software also provides tools for organizing your story components as well as drafting the story itself. As you can see below, I began writing my notes for NaNoWriMo 2010 in Storybook before switching over to Scrivener. I was already using the “scene” idea. Each of the thin boxes you see in the left-hand pane represents a modular scene. Storybook allows you to drag those around as need between the chapters (the larger gray boxes).
Open Source Storybook Software
If you’d like to try fiction writing software and don’t have money to spend, Storybook is a nice option since it’s free of charge (though the free version does contain a few “nag” messages about donating to the project).
From now until the release of the finished version, the public beta for Scrivener for Windows is free. (The Mac version can be downloaded as a free trial.)
yWriter 5 is a free product as well, and is worth taking a look at.
There are many other text editors, word processors, and novel writing products on the market you can consider as well. Some of these are listed on my site’s Resources page.
Conclusion
Getting a novel written in 30 days is not an impossible challenge. In each of the last two years, I’ve managed to win the NaNoWriMo challenge of creating 50,000 words of original fiction in a month. The keys for me have been to plot out the idea in advance, use a modular approach to constructing the story, use a revision log to keep myself from wasting time revising as I go, and having novel writing software to help me keep things organized. Hopefully, some of these tools and ideas will help you in your own writing.
