It’s November and most of us in America are getting ready for Thanksgiving at the end of the month, but about 300,000 people aren’t worried about cooking the perfect turkey, or the on-going family debate of raisins versus no raisins in the stuffing. They have a very different goal this month – to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It’s National Novel Writing Month, affectingly known as NaNoWriMo. These literary adventurers will either have a rough draft of their first novel by November 30, or at least a good sized chunk of it.
That’s approximately 1,700 words a day for the month. If you figure about a 12 point font, double spaced, that’s about three to four pages a day for 30 days. If the page is dialogue heavy there may be fewer words, but if it is description heavy then it may be more words per page. Like a lot of things in writing, it depends.
I applaud everyone who’s taken up the challenge. When I wrote my first novel, Nightseer, I wrote two pages a day, every day before work. I was in a cube farm in corporate America and I’d found that I was too exhausted by day’s end to do anything creative; so I got up early before work and did my two pages. Let me add that at that time I was not a morning person, by any stretch of the imagination, but I wanted to write my book badly enough to find a consistent time to write, because consistency is what it’s all about when you’re writing novels. I’d written short stories for years but never had the guts to tackle a book length project. I’d been writing since I was twelve, decided I wanted to be a writer at fourteen, started sending stories out and collecting my rejection slips at seventeen. I was twenty-one and had graduated college and landed my first job, but I still wanted to be writer. I knew that if I hoped to make a living as one I had to write novels, short stories weren’t going to pay enough, so I put my butt in a chair at least five days a week and did two pages every morning. Two pages didn’t seem like much at first, but doing two pages day after day meant in three hundred days I had six hundred pages and at the end of two years I had even more pages and a first draft. I honestly can’t remember how many pages the first draft was, but I know I’m one of those writers that writes long and cuts a lot, always have been, probably always will be. Other writer’s first drafts are far shorter than the finished manuscript, so their second drafts are all about adding stuff in, instead of cutting. I would do seven drafts of Nightseer before I sent it off to an agent, who sent it around to publishers. I would do another draft to editorial order, mostly the editor pointed out that I hadn’t described a single piece of clothing in the entire book. I added clothing description and more physical description at the editor’s request, and I never forgot again (some may say I’ve over compensated).
Here are the most valuable things I learned in the two years it took me to write my first novel, that would eventually sell and begin my career:
1. Don’t revise as you write first draft.
Why, or why not? Because the greatest danger to any first time novelist is getting bogged down and not finishing the first draft of the first novel. Write your word count a day and just keep adding to the growing pile of pages; if you stop to revise as you go, perfectionism will catch you and sink you. You certainly won’t make the word count per day if you try editing while writing the first draft, or I wouldn’t. Even after writing 40 books, I still have to be careful not to start editing too much during first draft, because I’ll get stuck too. Once you have a draft finished, you can polish in the second draft, that’s what subsequent drafts are for, polishing.
2. Don’t stop writing your first draft to do extra research.
I’m going to assume that you wouldn’t have sat down to write a book without some background, or interest in the topic, so you’ve done enough research to do a first draft. Wait on extra research until you have hundreds of pages beside your computer and a finished draft. Why wait? Because if you’re anything like most writers that I know, including myself, sending us to a library is a dangerous thing because we’re surrounded by BOOKS! We have good intentions of looking up only the specific topics we came to research, but it’s a library, it’s like Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders, and just like Aladdin if we touch the wrong treasure we’ll never get out alive, or at least not out in time to make our deadline. The internet is equally deadly for research, maybe more so, because it’s always at our fingertips. Do not do extra research until the first draft is finished unless the fact you need is absolutely essential to writing the current scene, but usually it’s not. Beware that research doesn’t become a procrastination tool. I still type all caps – NOTES; WHAT DOES FIFTEENTH CENTURY UNDERWEAR LOOK LIKE? or, NOTES; WHAT FOOD WOULD BE AT A MEDIEVAL WORLD BANQUET? These were both notes I had in my first novel, but I didn’t need to know the answers to get my heroine undressed for bed or to have her confront her sister over dinner. My second draft was just filling in the notes, and my third draft was where I started polishing the language. You might say my second draft was research questions only.
3. Do not get caught up in the perfect opening sentence in your first draft.
You can start the draft with gibberish for all it matters, because the important thing in a first draft is all those hundreds of pages after that first sentence; without them, the first sentence doesn’t matter a damn. What? you say, The first sentence is very important! You’re right, in fact it’s vital. Your first sentence, first paragraph, will sell the entire book to the right editor and to readers after it’s published. But I’ve seen too many writers get caught up in making the beginning of a book perfect, to the point where they polish the first chapter over and over, and never finish the book. A great first line may sell a book to an editor, but it won’t sell a few chapters to anyone. The day’s when editors would buy an unfinished manuscript from a first timer are decades past. To sell a book, you have to finish it first. Even today the opening lines/paragraph is often the last thing I revise, not the first. I’ll agonize over the first sentence, but only after the rest of the book is polished and singing.
4. Write your idea, and don’t worry if it’s good enough to sell.
Your ultimate goal is to sell, but if you start worrying about selling before you have ever finished a single book, you aren’t just putting the cart before the horse, you’re buying a saddle before you’ve taken riding lessons. I don’t know if your idea is good enough to sustain a book, let alone good enough to be your first selling novel, but I know you have to start somewhere, why not this idea? Maybe it’ll suck, but maybe it’ll be great, you’ll never find out if you don’t take the chance and write it.
5. Last piece of advice that helped me write my first five novels, all of which sold.
The 70/30 rule. I found that seventy percent of my first drafts were garbage, but thirty percent was gold, but I had to write all one hundred percent of the draft to get that thirty percent of shining gold because it was scattered among the seventy percent of unusable garbage. My garbage quotient has gotten lower as I’ve gained more practice as a writer, but it’s still a good rule of thumb if you’re one of the writers that writes long and then revises like I do.
Good luck all you November writers! Happy Hunting!