What I learned from NaNoWriMo

And don’t worry, this will undoubtedly be my last NaNo-related entry…until next year.

Doing NaNoWriMo this year was a blast. I mentioned it to a couple of friends on October 31, thinking, Maybe I could do some writing…but fifty thousand words? That’s a lot of pages. (Many people on the NaNo boards are in shock because they wrote 100 pages of text, and my first reaction is, You didn’t use manuscript format, did you? I had 240 pages.)

I don’t know when it became apparent to me that I was really going to go for the whole fifty thousand word kit and kaboodle. Sometime in the first ten thousand words I realized that I had to throw out the outline I was so carefully working on. Why? I don’t know. There have been many debates on Wordplay on the utility of outlines. Terry and Ted and other pros recommend them highly. I can totally understand why they are a crucial part of screenwriting. So why didn’t my outline work for me? A couple of reasons, I expect:

1. I wasn’t outlining the right way for me—I was doing it in too clinical and detached a fashion. Scene 1, scene 2, scene 3. Instead, if I wanted to do an outline, I think I’d have to start by telling myself a story (“Once upon a time there was a woman who wanted to steal a jewel, and the five Feds who wanted to stop her”) and flesh it out that way.
2. I also think outlines may work better for screenplays than for novels. Having a tight story is absolutely crucial in a screenplay: forget page count, you only have so much screen time, and everything has got to count. In a novel, though, you can meander a little more. Yes, I believe you’ve got to have structure in a novel. You just don’t have to get there right now or the audience is out buying popcorn.
3. I got very much caught up in the “get words out, any damn words” frenzy, which produced, as it is wont to do, some very weird words. I had a vague idea who the killer was going to be, but once I dreamt some of this stuff up I realized that having that person be the killer wasn’t going to work.

I haven’t gone back to read what I have at the moment—I think I’ll let it rest for a bit—but I know one thing: it’s given me text to work with, and a story to go after.

One of the most popular complaints of the writer is that the next idea seems so much more attractive than the one you’re working on now, and this is totally true: it always does. Of course, everyone always wants to drop the one they’re working on at this moment and go on to the next one, which is a bad idea. Why? Because the next one is going to have the same problems as this one does. The current one is real and extant and horribly flawed and little mutant, whereas the next one still exists in a state of perfection in your mind. Anyone can dream about the perfect next project. It’s getting the current project into good shape that’s important.

Rewriting doesn’t scare me the way it used to. I used to think, I got it out once, now I’ll just tweak it. Now I rev up the chainsaw and say, Where do we start? It’s just words. I can always produce more words.

One of the best things this NaNo exercise did for me was force me to write big and long. I have a tendency to write spare, which doesn’t happen to be a kind of fiction writing I particularly enjoy reading. I don’t want to be rushed through things, I want to find out what’s going on. It’s pretty clear where the spare writing comes from, of course: it’s helpful if you can write short and pithy in a screenplay. Not so much in fiction. I would rather write long and wordy and then cut down than figure out where to bulk up in later drafts.

I’m not at all surprised I came in “short” (at only 50,000 words!)—my first full-length screenplay came in short too. I’ve never had that problem again. Writing longer began to feel good during this past month.

Anyhow: doing this was an exercise I recommend highly. I am totally doing this again next year.