The World’s Tiniest NaNoWriMo

Last time I mentioned that I was going to attempt the “world’s tiniest NaNoWriMo”. I wrote it casually, offhandedly, to avoid the notice of the “No you can’t” voices. No, you’re too busy; you’re too stressed; the pandemic is still taking up too many brain cycles; you haven’t written any fiction since well before the pandemic began.

That was all true…but I was determined to try.

I picked a work in progress, a lighthearted fantasy novel that I had started for NaNoWriMo 2019. I’d written 20,000 words that November (an official NaNo is 50K words, and most novels are between 80K and 120K, depending on the genre). I’d written only a few thousand words on it since then, but I had an outline to guide me, and I thought I could manage to pick up from where I’d left off.

I set the “tiniest possible goal”, 100 words a day, which has worked for me before when trying to restart the flow of creativity after a writing drought. (Those happen to me regularly.) Writing that slowly is not a great way to get a coherent story, especially novel length, but sometimes there’s nothing else to be done.

Then I did the smartest thing: almost every evening I went and hung out with my online writer friends, and we challenged each other to “word wars”. You both start writing on your own projects at an agreed-upon time, and stop when the timer you’ve set goes off (usually 10 or 15 minutes, although it can run longer). Then you compare how many words you’ve each written during that time. Of course the goal isn’t to see who wrote the most words, but the fact that you DID both write some words towards a finished draft.

Thanks to the encouragement and competition from my friends, I made it halfway to my original goal well before mid-November. (100 words a day works out to 3000 words by the end of November.) I raised my goal and did it again, and again. In the end I wrote just over 10,000 words, or 333 words per day. (The NaNo site has some awesome graphs to keep track of all this, and they absolutely played a role in pushing me to write more. Why yes, I am a data geek.)

At the beginning of the month, 10,000 words had been my secret stretch goal. And yes, there were tears when I made it.

Some things I learned…

When you say “it’ll be easy, I have an outline!” remember to look for it before making any such claims. At the beginning of NaNo, I was embarking on the second quarter of the plot, and I discovered that the outline I’d written some time ago consisted of exactly four very vague bullet points for that quarter. This is not the first time that’s happened, either.

Don’t be afraid to get messy. I’d left off shortly after introducing a new character, and when I started writing again, she was just failing to gel with the existing cast or fit into the worldbuilding I’d set up. Finally I wrote “Chapter 7, v. 2”, backtracked in story time a couple of days, and introduced a different character who immediately leapt off the page. I skipped ahead past a couple of scenes that didn’t have much of the original character (and could therefore be salvaged) and kept going. Then I introduced another new character…who had been meant as a foil (contrast) to the first version, and thus didn’t work so well as a foil to the second. So she also failed to gel, and I wrote her out entirely and kept going. (Because it was NaNo, all of those scene drafts are still in the main document so that they could count towards my word count total. I’ll cut them out and stash them somewhere else later, because you never know…I’ve gotten entire novels out of side characters, not once but twice.)

Explore, but don’t self-edit too early. Your mileage may vary on this one: some writers create very clean first drafts because they edit as they go, or they outline ahead of time and stick to it, or other magical methods that mostly elude me. For me, I have to separate my writer-brain and my editor-brain, but writing messily (as described above) feels more like playing. It’s engaging the right side of the brain, not the left. (Sometimes with short stories I write about half the story, realize what I was trying to say with it, start over and write to the end. After that, it’s just tweaking. But short stories have a LOT fewer moving parts than novels.)

Have fun. What floats my boat with writing? Carefully crafted prose. Vivid characters. Interesting worldbuilding. A setting that has enough life to be a character of its own. Banter. Fun action scenes. So this story has all of the above, with a lighter heart and more humour than some of my stories, because, well… *gestures around at the state of the world* (NaNo 2019 occurred before the pandemic, but during the last American presidential administration, so.)

And now? Well, 30K-odd words is still not a novel. The pandemic is still on, my day job is still busy, the spurt of energy I had in the fall has subsided, and did I mention I don’t do well with winter? But…the story has some momentum now, my writer friends are still there in the Internet, and I’m still writing. 100 words a day.