Accountability to a diagonal line

Part of the attraction of the NaNoWriMo challenge is the vague sense of accountability it gives you. No one is looking over your shoulder to see what you have written, or slapping your hand with a ruler if you set aside your writing to check Facebook, but you still feel responsible (if only to a website) to get the work done.

You are encouraged to update your word count on the website every day to document your progress. The number is posted prominently on your page, along with stats like

• How many words you should have written by now.
• How far behind or (just imagine) ahead you are.
• Your current daily word count average.
• When you will finish at your current pace.
• Number of words you need to write each day in order to finish in a month. 

But the biggest motivator for me was one of the simplest. The purple line.

The blue bars are your daily totals, and the purple line is where you need to be each day to reach 50,000 words in 30 days. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

As you can see on the graph, I put myself behind the 8-ball by writing absolutely nothing for the five days I was in Phoenix. At the worst, I was almost 8800 words, or five days behind. I had another non-productive day on the 17th, but over the next four days I was able to get in some extra work and reduced the deficit to around 5600 (or 3 days). I was still too far behind, but I was slowly clawing my way back.

Writing is definitely a rhythm thing for me, and motivation often follows momentum. But nothing focuses my energies like an approaching deadline. I found the simple, graphical representation of where I needed to be at all times more helpful than anything to keep me on track. It felt like I was almost physically reaching for the bar to pull myself back up.

Week three was somewhat of a mad scramble to get caught up, and the added pressure helped to muzzle the inner editor (a little). The words weren't coming any easier, but it started to feel like the good to crappy ratio was getting a little better. Certain elements of the story were starting to come into focus, and there were moments when I would pick up and expand on something I wrote, seemingly at random, weeks earlier.

I still had a turning point and ending to work out, but chasing the purple line kept the story moving forward.

Week two, more stalling

I read somewhere among all the helpful material posted on the NaNoWriMo site that week two is often the hardest for writers. In week one, the excitement and novelty of the challenge keeps your motivation high. You are also doing a fair amount of world-building to set up the story, and some writers can spend many hours and chapters introducing all the players.

In week two, some of the new-challenge glow has worn off, you are out of set up material, and it starts to feel more like work than fun. There are very few players in my novel, so I had less of the built in bit of introductory material to write. As I mentioned in the previous post, I started struggling early on, but I wrote enough each day to maintain the word average necessary to hit 50,000 in 30 days. For the first 10 days that is. Then I left town.

I went to visit a friend in Arizona for five days. I brought along my computer thinking that I might get up early to get in an hour or two of writing before everyone else was up. But I was fooling myself. We stayed up into the wee hours each evening, and I just didn't have it in me to take away hours from our visit to write. Outside of writing a few hundreds words while waiting for my flight, nothing was done for five days.

I thought that at least some ideas would be percolating in the background while I stepped away from the novel, but it didn't seem like I returned with much of anything new. Except an 8,000 word hole that I would have to dig myself out of. Time to return to my cramming skills developed in school.

Distraction

When I was younger, I could tune out everyone around me in a crowded restaurant or coffee shop, but could not resist the small distractions of home. If I wanted to get any work done, I had to get out of the house.

I worked in restaurants all through school. School during the day, work four or five evenings a week. I would try to get some work done in between, but I was often up past midnight studying. But if I went home, tv or bed was too great a temptation. I spent many evenings at the local Denny's studying or doing homework.

I knew the menu by heart and was on a first name basis with all the servers. One was even inspired to go back to school after watching me study there night after night. I developed my penchant for coffee shops not long after, and could spend hours lost in a book oblivious of all the chatter of the nearby tables.

Unfortunately, I have lost some of that ability to focus in a loud room.  My ability to shut out distracting temptations at home is a bit better, but only slightly. I live with two roomies and a small child, so it is easy to get drawn into the activity of the house. So I had to go to the "office" to get my writing done.

Starbucks was the most tempting, but I most often ended up at the local library to save money. It is only a couple miles away, and of course there should be librarians keeping the noise level down. Most of the people there were huddled around the computers up front, so I often had the tables in the stacks to myself. I could spend a couple hours a day there getting my words in.

I found some online help in case the going got particularly tough. There is a Chrome browser extension called Stay Focusd. You can set up hours you should be working, and if you visit selected (or all) sites online, a timer starts. After a selected online time has expired, you are blocked out for the rest of the day. If you try to visit anyway, a page pops up that says "Shouldn't you be working?"

Another site is called Write or Die. Depending on the consequences you chose, when you stop writing a pop up will taunt you, an annoying sound will play, or the program will start unwriting what you have written. The desktop version prevents you from using the backspace key.

Fortunately, I didn't have to go to the software nuclear options, but it was close.

Quieting the inner editor

Day one, November 1st, 30 days to write a 50,000 word novel.

To make the 50,000 word mark, I needed to average about 1,700 words a day. I have no idea if this sounds like a lot to you, but in practice it felt huge at times. Day one went reasonably well as the details of the first scene had been working themselves out in the back of my mind. Day two, I was on my own.

One of the stated goals of NaNoWriMo is to turn off your inner editor. That little (sometimes loud) voice that says, "that paragraph makes no sense, you have nothing new to say, you're not much of a writer, no one will ever want to read this, this is all crap..." The point of the challenge is to create enough time pressure that you are forced to just write as quickly as possible. In order to get your daily count of words, you need to muzzle that inner editor. Quantity over quality. What you are writing may indeed be crap, but you can always clean it up later. If you listened solely to your inner editor, nothing would ever get written.

For the first week of writing, I still struggled against the voices and hesitated too long over sentences. It would take me a while to get the ball rolling and I found myself staring too often at that little word count number at the bottom of the page. Writing became a rhythm thing, and things would speed up in the second half, but each morning I would stall out again.

The one thing I was able to do to limit the inner editor was that I didn't go back and read what I had written at the end of the day. Once it was down on the screen, I did not go back to it. Each morning I would read the last paragraph or two to see where I left off, but I would not go back any farther. I didn't want to give my inner editor any more ammunition than it already had.

Working with a guide but no guidelines

I have seen the period before actual writing described as the "compost period". You let stories and characters sit in the deeper reaches of your brain and let them ferment. I spent the month before NaNoWriMo doing just this, but it didn't feel like I had much to show for it when November 1st rolled around. In truth, there were probably themes and ideas that would pop up later, growing in the background during the month, but there was little to start the pen rolling on day one.

What I had was a backdrop for the book. It would take place along the Pacific Coast of the United States, hugging the coastline for much of the journey. As far as story, I had an opening moment (not even a scene) and one more scene I would use sometime later in the book. That is about it. As day one of writing approached, the details of the first scene were probably growing in the background, but I still had little idea where the story would lead.

Encouraged by Stephen King's method of writing, I planned to write my way into the story. I have learned this method of writing is often called "discovery writing". I don't recall if he called it this in his book, but one of the passages I highlighted in On Writing describes it as,

"I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story...I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn't to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety - those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot - but to watch what happens and then write it down."

So I had permission to just wing it somewhat and see what would happen. But it felt like I was working without a net.

On Writing

We decided to participate in NaNoWriMo some time in September, about a month and a half before it began on November 1st. This would be the time to start plotting and planning, but of course that is not what I did initially. I went back to some of my stalling techniques.

Some years ago, I bought Stephen King's book On Writing but never read it. It was one more book sitting on the shelf, quietly mocking me. With a deadline approaching, I finally pulled it down to see what this best-selling author had to say. It turned out to be a wonderful book on the craft of writing, and it inspired me to relax a bit about the upcoming month of writing.

Can you inspire to relax, or is that an oxymoron?

My inclination is to over-plan certain things, imagining pitfalls and solutions ahead of time. Planning to write every day for a month, without a place to begin much less an outline of the story, had me questioning if this attempt would fail before I even began. On Writing gave me a plan that wasn't a plan.

After some memoir material about how he became a writer, the book described the advantages and pitfalls of how he went about writing his novels. One thing he mentioned was that he often started a novel with little more than an initial scene with one or two characters, and maybe a conflict. Unable to imagine planning or writing 50,000 words, I latched on to this technique and worried a little less about how unprepared I was.

But only a little.

Set me a task! Give me a deadline!

Like so many aspiring authors (to carry on a theme), I had visions galore of what it would be like. I subscribed to Writers Digest, I bought books on writing, had several notebooks filled with journal material - but I still didn't start any real writing projects. I searched in vain for that perfect tool, that perfect pen, that perfect time of day that would make my perfect writing atmosphere complete. But I was just stalling.

I am very deadline focused as many sleepless nights of cramming for finals will attest to. Give me a week, I will start six days later (maybe six and a half). With no one shouting for a paper to be written, it remained unwritten. NaNoWriMo would give me a deadline that I so desperately needed, and I had a friend that would participate as well. We see each other four or five times a week, and we would keep each other on task.

Maybe this time it would actually happen.