One of the most heartwrenching moments for me was my first NaNoWriMo. Not in my case. I persevered despite a computer crashing, getting another one overnighted, getting Scrivener installed, waiting 48 hours for Dropbox to get done indexing and finally load my files onto my laptop… THEN writing my novel.
I won.
Then went onto Twitter and saw the agonized tweets of people who tried and failed.
That was heart breaking to see.
Couple that with seeing the tweets of smug people trying to rob them of hope, “If you wrote one word, you won.”
No.
You lost.
NaNoWriMo is the event where people all over the world write a novel in one month time. It requires only 1667 words a day to complete 50,000 words – the bare minimum for a novel.
If someone wrote one word, they did not win. They know it. Hence the soul wrenching agony.
“I want to write a complete novel so badly!”
When you encourage someone to fail, they get really good at failing.
Nicholas reicher
Encourage them to win.
Help them.
Tell them what they’re doing wrong.
In some cases – I’d say a minority of writers – you have to tell them, “You do not have the gift.” It’s just simple logic. Not everyone can write. Not everyone is creative.
But the vast majority of people who try NaNo and fail are not failing because they do not possess the gift, they just don’t possess the know-how.
What are they doing wrong?
Trying to write about a character and not a plot. This I suspect is the biggest reason for failure. You fall in love with a protagonist – usually yourself – and want to write a novel about how cool they are. Novels are not about cool people. Novels are often about flawed people who have bad things happen to them while they try to accomplish something at the risk of death, whether symbolic death or real death.
Really, that’s it in a nutshell. Forget your cool protagonist. Give them a flaw and put them in a situation. Now you have a novel.
Assuming they are a pants’er. This is how writers are always depicted in movies and on TV. They just sit down and write to find out what happens. You never see the writer with the messy desk and the dog-eared coffee stained notebook. That’s what they should be showing.
In the writer’s convention I went to, I interviewed a lot of writers. I found only one who’s workflow can be called pants’ing.
Only one. And she had an entire table full of self published novels – over a dozen.
That’s a pants’er.
Try pants’ing. If you can knock out a novel in 30 days, pantsing is your work flow. You are indeed a pants’er.
If on the other hand, you get frustrated and easily run out of steam after a couple of scenes… you’re not a pants’er. You’re a planner.
I don’t know why writers get offended when I say this. If I tell you to pick something up and you reach with your left hand, you’re left handed. That’s not cause for offense, it’s a statement of fact. Understand you are left handed, get on with life.
If I tell you to write a novel and you can bang out 85,000 words in five weeks with little or no planning – you’re a pants’er.
Again, I’ve only met one. I’ve met a lot of planners who lie to themselves and tell themselves they’re a pants’er.
I consider myself a planner, even though most planners would decry my workflow as pants’ing. I must have a one line description of 60 plotpoints, or I can’t finish my novel. Bottom line. I know it. Every time I try to write a novel without doing this first, I fail. If I do this and the concept is good, then I can bang that novel out rapidly.
And that’s reason three.
Not planning your novel. This reason dovetails with the preceding one. As I just wrote, if I didn’t plan it, it doesn’t matter whether I acknowledge my planner workflow or not. Acknowledge you are a planner, then get on wtih the planning!
Bottom line – you need at least 50 plot points. 60 is better. If you can’t write at least 50 plot points organized by 3 act structure – you don’t have a novel. Or the story is too weak to sustain sufficient plot points to be a novel. It amounts to the same thing.
Summary
If you failed NaNo, it’s one of three reasons – you’re not a writer, you chose the wrong emphasis, and/or you used the wrong workflow. Adjust your workflow and focus, and keep trying. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the gift – as long as you enjoy the writing.
That’s all that counts. That’s what matters.
