Learning from NaNoWriMo: a Survivor's Guide

It's November again, which means that it is three years to the month since Daisy and Hazel began their adventures on the very first page of my very first draft of the book that would one day become Murder Most Unladylike.

Yes, Murder Most Unladylike started life as a NaNoWriMo novel. NaNoWriMo, for those who haven't heard of it before, is a project that aims to get aspiring authors/nutcases to write 50,000 words of a novel in the 30 days of November. To achieve your target, you must write 1,667 words each day, every day, without fail, even if your dog just threw up right in front of you and you have pneumonia and you've worked a 12-hour shift . . .

Basically, NaNoWriMo is self-inflicted literary torture, but people are supposed to do it FOR FUN.

I've written before about my very mixed emotions regarding the use and worth of NaNo. The idea of it is wonderful, and it truly works for many people. A lot of very good and very beloved novels began as NaNo projects, and I'd be a big liar if I didn't acknowledge its role in my own book's creation.

NaNoWriMo class of 2005

But I'd also be untruthful if I pretended that the word document I ended up with on the 30th of November 2011 in any way resembles the book that will be available for purchase come May 2014. After NaNoWriMo finished I couldn't even bear to look at what I'd written for about four months. I picked it up next in March and proceeded to completely re-write the entire manuscript. Then I put it down for another year (while I did my MA), then I did another complete re-write, then I submitted to agents and then (I am seriously not exaggerating any of this) I knocked 25,000 words off the manuscript I had submitted at my new agent's suggestion.

So, did NaNoWriMo help me write a book? Yes. Did it help me write a good book? Er, no. And that's (at least partly) because NaNo's most basic flaw is that it values sheer quantity of words produced over quality. Writing at speed can produce amazing results, but what it usually produces is a pile of utter pants that needs to be mercilessly reworked before it is ready to show to other human beings.

My NaNo draft of Murder Most Unladylike (and I can't stress this enough) was HORRIBLE. It was AWFUL. I knew about Daisy, and Hazel, and I knew who the murderer was (I wrote their name down on the first page of my notebook and then felt proud because I had Created A Plot), but I had no idea how my detectives were going to end up solving the mystery, or even what the mystery actually was. Basically, I had no understanding of the world I was creating or the story I was telling - which, when I look back on this now, makes me feel a bit wobbly.

Last week I went to a Holly Black event where someone asked a question about writers' block. Writers' block, Holly replied, shouldn't be seen as a problem in itself. What it is is a symptom, and so instead of behaving like you have been struck down by the black spot and there is nothing to be done but despair (she didn't say this, I'm paraphrasing), you should use your feeling of writers' block to diagnose the deeper plot issues you're having.

NaNoWriMo class of 2011

I love this attitude! I think it's incredibly true. I can't ever write a scene if I haven't seen it very clearly in my head first. I also need to know who the characters in the scene are, why they're there and what they're saying to each other, and I can't know that if I don't know the story I'm telling. For me, writers' block is a big red flag that says YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING, GO AWAY AND COME BACK WHEN YOU ARE MORE PREPARED. And, for me, a project like NaNo doesn't allow this kind of breathing-space, or warn its participants that such a breathing-space is necessary.

But, see, I don't know if I'd have discovered that if I hadn't had full and shocking experience of what happens when I don't know my story. I learned that I do need structure, and I do need to plan (and then I discovered colour-coded plotting on huge spreadsheets,but that's another story). So in a way, NaNo's big problem gave me a very big revelation that I've been using ever since.

NaNo also gave me a big wake-up call about output. Those 1,667 words a day taught me that writing a sentence doesn't need to take twenty minutes. It can take that long, and sometimes it needs to, and that's OK, but the way I pre-plan scenes (I watch them in my head, like puppet-shows, several times over) means that when I come to actually write I am capable of turning out 1,000 words in an hour without breaking a sweat. Actually, if I try, I can do a lot better than that. I recently finished work on the first draft of something totally non-Daisy and Hazel related, and I think I must have written the last 10,000 words in about five inspired hours one afternoon. Afterwards my brain felt like someone had cleaned it out with a stick, and I am absolutely sure that those 10,000 words will need an enormous edit, but again that's OK, because re-writing is the part of the writing process that I really love. And that's another thing that I've learned about myself since my first NaNo effort.

These days I mostly write my books during my morning commute, which at the moment is 50 minutes on the train. I sit down, I open my laptop, and then I gather all my NaNo knowhow and sprint-write for 45 minutes flat. And that's my wordcount done for the day! I've learned how to leap into to my world and my scene and just go with it, and that's an extremely valuable writing lesson that doing NaNo has taught me. You can edit later, and you ALWAYS ALWAYS SHOULD. Please. Seriously. You need to. But if you don't get those words out, there will be nothing to edit, and then you'll really be in trouble.

So what I think I'm saying is this: all writing exercises are incredibly valuable, even if what you get out of them initially feels more negative than positive. Projects like NaNoWriMo can help you kickstart yourself as a writer, and I'd advise all aspiring novelists to have a go. I'd even advise you to stick at it all the way to the end of the month, even if you're hating it and not making wordcount. But what I wouldn't advise is for you to do it again, if you gave it a real go and still discovered that it doesn't work for you. Writing isn't school (thank goodness) - there's no 'correct' way to make a book. Try everything, and then ignore what doesn't work (no matter how popular it is) and just do what feels fun and right for you. Because, seriously, the only writing advice that will actually help you is this:

KEEP WRITING THE BOOK UNTIL IT IS FINISHED. And then go back to the beginning and write it again.

Happy November.

Reviews - Arthur and George and Detection Unlimited

NaNoWriMo 2011 is over, and I am officially a winner. Phew, look at that handsome purple colour on my stats. It was actually - strange as this is to admit - not that difficult to do. Maybe I write too much. Now that I'm done, though, I'm wondering what I'm I supposed to do with all my extra time I have. Leisure! What is it? I feel like a medieval scribe on day release.

Anyway, the final part of my November was busyness as usual. I did an interview with the talented and most interesting Polarbear - whose latest show finishes on the 3rd, but whom you should keep an eye out for in the future. He's a very nice guy and I only blanked out and said UM while I was talking to him once. Or maybe twice.

The Literary Review's Bad Sex Award shortlist 2011 has also been announced! Oh joy, oh happiness, oh crowning moment of my year. My personal favourite The Blue Book didn't make the cut (read my review of it for some choice examples of why I thought it should have), but there's some pretty choice stuff all the same. I've written an article about it for Litro (and for the record, I'm now backing David Guterson's Ed King. It's - wow. Just wow.)

And on to the reviews. This week's theme appears to be detective fiction (which is never far away, for me. I've got a bit of a thing for it, and when I start my dissertation in a few months' time you are all going end up SICK of me talking about crime and detection and people doing gruesome things to each other in barns and privies and country manors). The two books in question are from two writers who came at the concept of writing a mystery novel from two very different perspectives, and with - I think - varying degrees of success.

First up is Julian Barnes's Arthur and George. Admission time: this has been on my shelf for years. My mother bought it for me when it first came out, and with typical fifteen-year-old insularity I didn't see why I should bother with a book about people who didn't even have last names. So I ignored it until last week, when a friend informed me that it was a crime novel in disguise. I read it immediately.

It turns out that both Arthur and George do have last names, one of which is a very famous last name indeed. I'm not going to spoil it for you (although I was told myself) because there's a very nice little oh! moment when you realise who it is you've been reading about. In fact, who Arthur and George both are turns out to matter just as much, and both of their identities are central to the direction of the plot. It's a very clever bit of narrative engineering from Barnes.

At the heart of Arthur and George is the retelling of the story of a real-life late-Victorian trial (again, I'm not telling you which one, although if I did I doubt you'd be enlightened - this has slipped very much out of the frame of general knowledge, one of the reasons why Barnes has picked up on it). Barnes uses a brilliant mixture of detailed research and sensitive imagination to write an account of the crime and its consequences that feels both compelling and real. What he's got to tell is fascinating, if awful - an account of spectacular police bungling and a terrible miscarriage of justice - and the first 200 pages or so had me completely gripped.

From there, though, things got a bit more murky in terms of enjoyment. Arthur and George is one of those books in which, by the middle of the text, the main event has already taken place . It always strikes me as a very bad idea, structurally, because no matter how well you write, what you've got to say after this point is essentially the world's longest postscript. And so it is here. After the trial, Arthur and George suffers a crisis of identity. Is it about the life of a great man? Is it an examination of a religious movement? Is it the story of an affair? Is it a crusade for justice? It's all of those things to some extent, but none of them are enough to give it focus and direction.

Now, it's possible that I feel this way because I was sold Arthur and George as a crime novel. Crime novels are expected to snap along like nobody's business, whereas the mood of this book is far more restrained and introspective. All the same, I'm not sure if Barnes is technically accomplished enough to convey all the insight he's trying to pack in in lieu of plot. He's at his best when he's describing events, not musing on human nature.

Arthur and George was clever and interesting, and I definitely enjoyed it more than anything else I picked up for the first time last month. But all the same, it has its flaws, which are enough for me to give it a

3.5 stars.

Next, we've got Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer. These days, Heyer's more famous for her Regency romances - and, in fact, I only had the dimmest notion that she wrote crime novels too until I was reminded of it by long-time fan and fellow blogger Desperate Reader. 

Detection Unlimited is a murder mystery very much in the tradition of the English Golden Age, a froth of high artifice and extraordinarily impossible circumstance, what Raymond Chandler describes in his (brilliantly jaded) essay 'The Simple Art of Murder' as 

the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests.

It's one of those books that you have to accept on its own terms, otherwise you'll go mad from plotholes and the sort of trickery-for-its-own-sake that 99% of actual human beings couldn't dream up in fifty years even with a gun (or a solid platinum poignard) being held to their throat. It's fun enough, it's ridiculous enough and at the denouement it's revealed that Heyer was playing a much bolder and more interesting hand of cards than I thought she was.

All the same, though, I had what can politely be described as Problems with it during my reading. While a mannered writing style is expected and to some extent even required, I'm not sure there is a book in existance that needs to use the word 'besought' to indicate speech more than three times. In fact, I think that once is one time too many. Heyer's detective, Inspector Hemingway, also caused me a lot of concern. Most Golden Age detectives have characteristics that give a modern reader serious pause in their attitude to those human beings unfortunate enough to be poor, odd or foreign, but Hemingway does it with such blissful license and obvious intention of being incredibly light-hearted and funny that he makes Josephine Tey's fearsome bigot Inspector Grant look like Albert Schweitzer.

It's ironic - and telling - that Inspector Hemingway bears a very close resemblance to the (real-life) Inspector in Barnes's novel whose insularity and narrow-mindedness ruins George's life. Inspector Anson decides that the schoolboy George is 'not a right sort', and from then on there's nothing George can do done to save himself. Similarly, when Hemingway hears that there's a Pole involved in the case he judges him before he even sets eyes on him (although as Not Guilty - in Hemingway's bemusing universe Poles are infuriating but totally irrelevant). In fact, everyone who is not upper class and in possession of at least a nice little historic red-brick in town does not matter in the slightest, nor are they suspects in the case - even though we're never really told why they should be so definitely ruled out. Hemingway works on whim and caprice, and though it's presented as a joke it feels at the very least like dangerously bad police work.

There's just a lack of logic here, a skipping over from A to G without any basis for the leap, and I ended up feeling completely swallowed up by the gaping plot holes that Heyer barely even bothers to paper over. I can't give it more than

2 stars.

1001 Books Review - The Leopard

Housekeeping again:

If you are assuming I have not been posting very much lately because I have been hard at work on my MA, you are very sweet and I admire your belief in human nature. Obviously, you are right. Yesterday, for example, I went to the British Library, where in the course of some very serious essay research I read the following sentence:

In February 1847, two elephants performing at Astley's Amphitheatre were presented with lots of bouquets. The elephants, we are told, had rather hoped for carrots and turnips.

(This is, in case you are interested, taken from The London Stage in the Nineteenth Century by Robert Tanitch, and I HIGHLY recommend it to you if you're interested in theatre history. It is not only factually fascinating but also delightfully snide). And if you are interested in what else I found out about the weird and wonderful on the London stage, you can read all about it over here.

During my time off from all this strenuous academic activity, though, I have been doing NaNoWriMo. If you don't know what this is, I have handily written a Litro blog about it. As of today I am 18540 words up and someone just died, so things are Going Well in that respect.

In the interests of linked-in completeness, I have also recently blogged about your furniture coming to life and eating you and written a (scathing) review of Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde. Enjoy! Oh, and I also read a book! Look at that. I haven't been totally wasting my time.

I have to admit, though, that I had a very major case of Not Getting Along with The Leopard. I could probably have finished it in a few days, but I'd read a few pages of it and then realise that BY GOD the bathroom could do with a clean and I needed to bake bread for lunch and how about that essay due in next week. I had to keep reminding myself that I was reading this for fun.

I think this is a prime example of the huge difference that exists between knowing that something is written well and actually liking it on a personal level. With the English MA student side of my brain I can see that The Leopard is meant to be a haunting evocation of the beauty of a vanished system and the transience of an individual life, but what I actually thought when I finished the novel was that Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa is kind of tiresomely self-indulgent, and that keeping a badly stuffed dog beside your bed for fifty years is gross.

Part of this has to be that The Leopard's atmosphere - and the novel is practically all atmosphere - really annoyed me. The whole thing takes place in an overwhelming state of rococo decay. Whenever characters appear they have to fight their way past profuse mountains of rotting roses and moulting silk sofas and five thousand Blessed Virgins with their paint coming off; and doing battle with all this scenery means that the poor things are exhausted and morose before they even begin to talk. Add to this the fact that they're in Sicily, where it's exhausingly hot all the time, and it's not entirely surprising that most of the scenes are variations on the theme of one character turning to another and saying, "Dude, I can't. Let's go lie down."

The plot of the novel is basically Prince Fabrizio (the Leopard of the title) not doing things, and then feeling sort of morose about it, but not morose enough to do anything except lie down. Occasionally he lies down with whores, and then he feels vaguely bad about it, which makes him have to lie down, which makes him realise that he is OLD and THE LAST OF HIS KIND and DOOMED TO DEATH, which is coincidentally a lot like LYING DOWN FOR EVER. Woe.

It's possible that I'm not that sympathetic to the Sicilian mindset (it was very heavily stressed that this attitude to life is Very Sicilian). It's also possible that I suffered from not understanding what on earth is going on historically - I just about know that Garibaldi was a man as well as a biscuit, a state of ignorance in a reader that obviously never occurred to Lampedusa. There are very few handy hints about historical background, and to make it worse Lampedusa has sort of half-assed an attempt to make the novel a knowing piece of post-modernity. What this means in practice is that the text will be totally immersed in the idioms and references of the 1860s and then all of a sudden a character's state of mind will be explained by reference to a MOTORWAY or an AIRPLANE or something equally weird and out of place. I think Lampedusa was going for a 'clever and humorous' angle, but to me it just felt awkward and half-way-to-nothing, like a fish with a human face stuck on it.

I'll admit, there were some moments that did work - there's a chapter about a weird erotic game of hide-and-seek through an enormous house that I thought was gorgeously written - but overall The Leopard just didn't do it for me. People are, of course, perfectly entitled to say that it's the greatest Italian novel ever, but I am likewise entitled not to agree with them at all.

Anyway, thank goodness, it's over now. One more 1001 Books book down! Only hundreds and hundreds to go! And for my next trick, I'm going to read something fun.

2.5 stars.

How Not To Write A Book

Last Sunday I finished the second draft of the book I've been working on since November (the first draft was unusual in that it broke off mid-sentence halfway through a scene, without resolving any of the plot, so what I actually mean is that I finished writing the book).

For about two seconds, I felt quite pleased with myself.

Then I realised that, even though this experience has (necessarily) turned me into a person who can write an entire book, beginning, middle and end, it has not had any other magical effect on my character - I am still someone who can spend an entire week sleeping without a pillowcase rather than go down one flight of stairs to pick out a new one, and it still takes me five days to write an email six words long, and I spent the next two days sulking about my ineffectiveness and general lack of purpose.

But anyway, since I now have real-life experience of sitting on my own a lot and stringing a foolish amount of words together, (so many, by the way, that the print-out of my manuscript doesn't fit in the ringbinder I bought for it. Oops.) I have decided to share my dubious wisdom with you, in case you want to do the same, and in the hopes that you won't do any of the damn stupid things that I have along the way. You will, of course, because that is how human beings work, but at least you might now do them in a subtly different way. That's the dream.

So.


Robin's How Not To Write A Book


1. Don't do NaNoWriMo

No, seriously. Don't do it. Just don't. You may think it's a wonderful artsy crafty special lovely idea but the truth is that it is beyond the powers of human endurance to conceive of and write anything even vaguely meaningful in less than 30 days. Yes, Jack Kerouac did write On The Road in three manic coffee-fuelled weeks, but he spent the eight years previous to that living with his material, so he was not just spewing brilliance out of a void.

Last year, I actually managed to win NaNoWriMo, proving that writing 50000 words in one month is indeed physically possible, but when I looked back over what I had written afterwards I discovered that the words I had written were the intellectual equivalent of drool. They made no sense. I was rushing so much that most of my characters did not have either names or personalities, weeks had eight days, plot lines vanished mysteriously and then reappeared again as something completely different, and floating up between every line of text were invisible words that read OH MY GOD I'M RUNNING OUT OF TIME, WHAT AM I EVEN DOING, THIS IS SO AWFUL THAT I WANT TO BE SICK ALL OVER IT.

NaNoWriMo is a very nice idea that, I think, is horribly misused by 99% of the people who do it. It's very useful as a way of learning just how much time you really do have to spend sitting in front of your computer screen to achieve a novel, and of how many words you can actually write in a day if you stop being such a whiny procrastinator, but as a medium for actually writing a book it's awful.

What it should be used for is a jumping-off point for your novel, a way of spitting out all your random thoughts onto a page without the stress of having to create a coherent story for them. If I ever do take part in NaNo again, I think I'd use it as a sort of pre-book warm up: 50000 words of different characters' backstory, maybe, random scenes, place descriptions, world-building and so on, so that when I do begin to write the book for real I've got a useful basis to build on. What I am NEVER GOING TO DO AGAIN is try to write an actual BOOK in A MONTH. Because, dear readers, IT DOES NOT WORK.

That is all.

2. Take Notes

Draw maps of your locations to avoid characters walking out of rooms through windows, or spending time in rooms that shouldn't exist at all, or seeing straight through walls like Superman (unless they are Superman; I don't know your brain).

It's always better when each character has only one name, rather than two or three entirely different ones depending on which scene they are in. Similarly, siblings should share the same surname and entirely unrelated people should not. Endeavour to avoid this by making extensive notes about each of your characters before you begin to write your story.

If you do put down a detail in your story, such as someone's birthday or their hair colour or their uncle's name, make a note of it in your notebook (if you don't have a notebook, you should). Otherwise you'll inevitably forget it and once you've forgotten it it's a hellish faff to trawl through all bajillion pages of your magnum opus to find the one small word you need.

Assume you are stupid and make notes accordingly. Then make more notes. Then make notes about your notes. Notes, in case you have not realised, are really quite useful things.

3. Check Your Details

See above, really. Are your characters listening to their iPods in 1960? Is Tony Blair following a policy of appeasement against Napoleon in the 1930s? Have you given your Victorian servant girl a lifesaving liver transplant? If any of these things are so, you may have a problem.

Read your manuscipt, then read it again, and then read it once more to make sure, and then give it to someone else to read. You will keep on finding mistakes, which will be dispiriting, but at least you will have found them, which is far better than the alternative.

And following on from that:

4. Do Your Research

Always a rather good idea. It's probably better not to do what I did, which was write most of the book and then do the research, at which point I realised that I'd made quite a few really big historical mistakes. Don't do that. Research first! Take notes! Read the notes! Use the notes!

No but seriously. NOTES ARE GOLDEN.

5. Keep Writing (Long Scenes Are Long)

You will not believe how long it takes to write a book. No, really - it's almost impossible to conceive of it. It's like trying to imagine the universe, you just can't do it properly. Sure, you may be able to imagine beginning your book, and then finishing it some time later, and you will be dimly aware that time will pass between those two events, but the reality of the hours and hours you will spend just writing down word after word after word - it's mindblowing. It's probably sublime.

There you are, sitting there, and you begin to write a scene. And you write, and you write, and the scene keeps going, and you write and you write, and the scene keeps going and going, and then you begin to wonder if the scene will ever be done, or whether it will just carry on into eternity - you imagine yourself writing and writing while the world ends and Earth is swallowed up in fire and in water and the last trump sounds and the Beast rises from the Pit and there you'll be, still writing the same scene. You naturally worry that your potential readers may have shrivelled up and died before the end of this particular scene, out of sheer boredom and despair - and then you check how much you've written and see that in five hours you've managed 452 words.

But do not worry, dear potential writer. At some point between here and eternity, you will indeed finish writing your scene, and then you will finish writing your entire book, and then you will feel really weird about it and wonder where your purpose in life has gone.

At this point you should begin writing another book.

6. Retype Your First Draft

By far the most useful piece of advice anyone gave me during the writing of this book actually sprang from a misunderstanding, as all the best bits of advice tend to do. After I had finished my NaNo draft I was about ready to pull a Bulgakov and just feck the damn thing onto the nearest open fire, since it seemed so totally and irredeemably horrid.

Then my friend suggested that I take my first draft and type the whole thing out in a different document, making changes as I went. What she meant, it turned out later, was that I put two document windows up next to each other on my computer screen and do it all from there, but what I actually did was print out my manuscript and type from that into a new file. It felt, comfortingly, as though I was writing an entirely new book, and it made me feel free to alter plot and content at will, safe in the knowledge that I didn't have to keep any of the bits that were crap.

I think there's really something in doing something like this: it's very easy to start thinking that everything you write is unrepeatable genius that needs to be preserved like the Rosetta Stone when in fact about 70% of your output is shitty and strongly in need of deletion. If you wait a bit and then read over what you've written it's easier to work out which is which, and when you're retyping, removing whole scenes feels less painful and more like you're just naturally making your story better. Which you are.

7. Get It Published

I'm totally joking here. I have no idea how to get a book published, though I gather it's something that people do manage sometimes. If you know how to attain this marvellous Holy Grail please do share your wisdom with me. At the moment I've never got further than the Finishing The Book stage - after that, any additional effort seems just far too difficult. What do you mean? I have to do more things now? What am I, a wizard? For god's sake, I can't even put a new pillowcase on my bed.