I think many people know about National
Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo which happens in November. This
November writing challenge began in 1999. Camp NanoWriMo began in
2011 and it currently has two events, one in April and the second in
July. In short, the goal is to draft a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.
I have been part of this since November 2017.
Since 2017, I’ve been a prolific
writer. I find that strange only because I’ve been trying to do other
things for that entire time. But having a NaNoWriMo event three times
a year has kept me actively writing. I don’t think I’ll give up
writing, but it isn’t the priority that it once was.
For the April challenge, and I thought
about it for months, I didn’t think I had another new novel in me.
This many be the case from here on out, who knows? But I do know that
I have a half a dozen folders that have little vignettes and sketches
for novels. I haven’t dipped into those yet. Some of them are thirty
years old, or more.
I also have a few more larger pieces of
writing that for years I counted as novels when they really weren’t.
There is Exile which I
initially wrote in 1993. It’s got about 17,000 words. I have not read
it since 1993 and there’s a good chance I never read it at all. There
is Twenty Four Hours in Vancouver.
I wrote that one in a thirty-six hour period in late November 1999
after a very scary trip to Vancouver, BC. Although this one has about
28,000 words, I don’t really consider this a novel. The following
year, while working at Standard Insurance in Portland, Oregon, I
wrote a piece called Mascaras y Muñecas
which was a very episodic story. This once I also considered a novel,
but again, at 28,000 words, it simply is not.
The
fourth one called The
Cataract
I wrote in the mornings in Puerto Vallarta when I was there in August
and September 2001. I wrote for 2 or 3 hours every morning. I was
really taken by this story. It was the first one I wrote out long
hand. When I finally got home from Mexico, I was eager to work on it.
I did the second draft that fall. And I never looked back. This
thing, something I also considered a novel was only 8,900 words.
That
said, I have four “novels” on my hands that are not really novels
at all. Should I ever get the time, I always thought, I’ll really do
a second draft, or a complete rewrite of these. I’ve never liked the
idea of rewriting something that is 20 or 30 years old, I’m a
different person and a very different writer now. I started to think
about this back in January knowing it these might be good options for
NaNoWriMo.
If
there is any advice I can give to those who want to do NaNoWriMo,
it’s this: make a plan. I mean, sure, make a plan about what you want
to write, planning a novel is a good thing for some. I’m not that
way. I mean plan for how you’re going to work. Plan the time of day
you’ll work. Make a plan for the conflicts and the characters and the
conversations. I like to stop my writing session in the middle of a
sentence, especially a sentence in dialog, that way, my mind is still
trying to finish that sentence. When I get back to work, I get to
pick up right off.
I
had decided to rework one of my former “novels” and it was just a
question of which one. I decided straight off to avoid Exile
but as I’m thinking about it now, I have a dozen things I could do
with it. I also decided to avoid Twenty
Four Hours in Vancouver.
Leaving me with the Mascaras
y Muñecas
or The Cataract.
I knew either would be good. The case for Mascaras
y Muñecas
was very good because I wrote the prequel to it last November. The
characters are still fresh in my mind. The
Cataract
ultimately captured my imagination. For starters, it had the smallest
word count. And we were on our way to Astoria for a family vacation
in March, and that was where I set the story.