5 rules to writing a novel in a month, or how to conquer NaNoWriMo

I 've never done NaNoWriMo, so I don't know if I qualify to write this blog post, BUT I BADLY WANT TO, ONE YEAR, WHEN I HAVE TIME! So, here are my qualifications for this post, before you start throwing rotten tomatoes at me. I typically write my first drafts in 6 weeks (8 weeks if I'm really taking my sweet time), so I suppose with the whole idea of writing a book in a month, I can totally dish on how to make it work in 4 weeks, because 6 weeks is, after all, ALMOST 6 weeks, right? Right. Here we go then. First of all, before I dive any deeper, I must warn you. My methods are pretty radical and not for the fainthearted. As in, my childhood has been far from happy, and I've learned to have a thick skin and an ability to make myself do things when I don't want to. If you're not the kind that likes to squeeze creativity out of yourself by any means possible, then I suggest you go watch butterflies somewhere else. Here we'll be talking glorious sweat, blood, and guts. What, still here? Alrighty then. 

Rule number one. For the month of November forget about any social outings or events or coffee dates or your uncle's birthday party. Like, seriously, take out your calendar and clear everything out. You will need, of course, to keep going to work, if you have a day job, but everything else goes. Next, go to the store and buy yourself food that can sustain you for a month, namely: lots of protein, veggies, fruit, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee. You're only permitted chocolate in terms of sweets, everything else must go. Sugar, processed foods, all tend to make you sleepy and stupid, and you can't have that while writing. Also, forget alcohol. Don't shake your head at me, I told you that my approach is radical. By the way, I'm describing my daily writing life here for you, it's what I do on a daily basis, while writing, all year long. Next, you need to tell everyone what you're about to do, because you're apt to get a lot of pissed off friends banging on your door, wondering what the hell has happened to you. Tell them, for the month of November, you're unreachable, period.

Rule number two. Okay, now that the basics are out of the way, you will have to decide what you're going to write about. Using my methods, it's very easy, except that not everyone likes my methods, as they are unconventional. Here is what I do. I dig deep inside and think of the most painful moment in my life, or one of the most painful moments, something I haven't told anyone, or told only a few select people. I look for something that doesn't let me sleep at night, that bothers me on a very deep level, and I start there (because writing is the best therapy there is). I just start spilling that pain in the very first sentence, and usually the first sentence is the summary of your novel, so there goes your planning. You don't need to do it, you know what your whole book is about. Don't believe me? Here, I'll illustrate. My trilogy SIREN SUICIDES starts with: "I chose to die in the bathroom because it's the only room in the house that I can lock." My YA novel ROSEHEAD (still in progress) starts with: "Lilith Bloom had a peculiar feeling that once she stepped into the rose garden,  it wouldn't let her out alive." And my literary novel IRKADURA (starting to write in December) starts with: "Irka stopped talking the moment she learned how to talk." If I can do it, you can do it. So do it.

Rule number three. Write, don't edit. This is a must, and if you happen to break this, I will find out where you live, come over, and chase you with a broom. Seriously. A great many books never get finished because writers get stuck in the constant editing. The goal is to throw the story on paper, the WHOLE story. You can worry about editing later, in the 2nd draft, but first you have to know what to edit. I will mention here what Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, has said: "First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.” See? Your whole job with NaNoWriMo is to write the story. Essentially, to write the first draft. I heard once about some famous writer who wrote 1st draft on a dare in 10 days, or something crazy like that. But that famous writer had already a ton of novels under his belt. Do you? I didn't think so. Neither do I. That's why we shall assume that it will take us a whole month to do 1st draft only.

Rule number four. Don't forget to read. You MUST include reading time into your daily NaNoWriMo writing routine. Literally, think of it as writing. It's part of writing. If you don't read, you can't write, might as well not even try. My formula is, I read half the time I spend writing. At least half the time. If I can, I read longer. Meaning, if I wrote for 4 hours, I try to read for at least 2 hours. Ideally, you can squeeze at least 4 hours of total work every day, meaning, you should block out about 3 hours for writing and about 1.5 hours for reading or so. If you can't write at least for 3 hours a day, I don't know if you can hit the goal of finishing the novel, unless it's only 50,000 words. My 1st drafts are typically about 120,000 words. If you divide it by 6 weeks it takes me to write them (and I write for about 4 hours a day), then it turns to 20,000 words a week, which will yield 80,000 words in 4 weeks, a pretty sizable 1st draft. Therefore, depending on your speed, you can absolutely do it within 4 weeks and 3 hours of daily writing. Oh, I forgot to mention, I write only on work days and take weekends off, so if you write on weekends during NaNoWriMo too, you can totally do it.

Rule number five. Have fun! We often forget why we write in the first place. We write because writing makes us happy. If at any moment you feel like you're blocked, stand up, stretch, look out the window, drink a cup of coffee, then sit down and write down the first thing that comes to mind, even if it seems unrelated to the story. The point here is - to have fun, to be goofy and completely unpredictable, to keep enjoying yourself. There is a reason why you do NaNoWriMo, isn't it? You were super excited when you decided to do it, didn't you? Well then, keep that excitement going! 

I'm out of rules here. And I pulled them out of thin air, anyway. I'm not participating this year in NaNoWriMo, I'm sorta doing my own NaNoWriMo, starting on 3rd draft of ROSEHEAD on Monday the 4th, so I will be racing along you. Happy writing!

Making fantasy REAL

Photo by Brooke Shaden

This is one of the scariest topics for me to write about, and, frankly, it didn't even occur to me to write about it until I asked my followers on Twitter what they would like to see next on my blog, and this particular topic, suggested by Brad Ulreich, stuck. Because it's one of my biggest struggles, bigger than writing dialogue. Writing fantasy is hard. Writing good fantasy is harder still. When starting out on SIREN SUICIDES, I blithely charged forward, naive and oblivious to any kind of notion of how to create a fantastical world that is also believable. And it's only in Draft 4 that inconsistencies started bugging me, as they did my beta readers, so in Draft 5 I tried paying close attention to the world building. I'm saying, tried to, because I'm still learning. What follows is what I have glimpsed so far, and I'm by no means an expert. Proceed with caution and be careful not to get tangled in the notion that this might be the truth somehow. it is not, it's no more than ruminations of a rookie writer.

Establish clear rules. I'm guilty of not being very clear about my world, and now that I'm almost done, I see it, but it's too late to go back and change the story. By rules I mean very distinct things that can or cannot happen in your fantasy. Imagine your story being a play of chess. If you had to explain it to someone who never played it, how would you do it? Now, if you had to explain it to someone who merely hasn't played for a few years, you would say it differently, right? Here lies the catch. As a writer, you know certain things that your readers don't. But simply because you know them, it doesn't even occur to you to explain them in very specific detail to the reader. But the reader will thank you for it! The reader is like that person who never played chess. The reader has no idea. Everything needs to be painstakingly explained, and not all at once either, but gradually, as the world of your story unfolds. But before you can do that, you have to know yourself what works, how, when, why, etc. This is the reason Draft 5 of my book turned into 3 books, because I simply slowed down enough to explain things.

Consistency over plot. This is a tricky thing I noticed when reading books, and I haven't seen anyone talk about it in the same vein, so I'd be curious to hear your comments. What I mean here is this. Once the rules of your world are clearly established, as in, all people in Dreamlandia are purple, they eat green capybaras for dinner, sleep 2 weeks out of a year, and live on one big baobab tree... err, let's not get carried away here, so, once your rules are established, feel free to not feel the pressure for providing a logical explanation behind everything that happens. This explanation is different from the one I was talking above. What I meant above was telling people that people in your book are purple. What I mean here is explaining why those people are purple. Who cares? They just are. You're the writer, you get to come up with anything you want. The point here is to believe in it yourself, and then we will believe in it too. The perfect example for left-out plot loops is Murakami's 1Q84. Read it and see for yourself. Because you believe in his world, you don't care about how it all happened, you want to know how it all resolves.

Supply made-up facts. This is another trick I picked up from reading, and it goes along the lines of yourself believing in your world. Because you now established the rules, and you made us believe in it, make it real by giving us facts about it, as if we were to read about it not in your book, but in a newspaper. Be as specific as you can. For example, purple people have only 4 right toes but staggering 10 left toes. And they always dream of pink zebras on Tuesdays, and on the first day of summer they each burp up a butterfly with the speed of 30 cracacacs a minute (now, who cares what a cracacac is, the point is, it sounds credible). Stephen King does this in Carrie by writing up actual news articles. Yann Martel does it in Life of Pi, inventing a fictional novelist and a report for the sunken ship. And in Harry Potter there is a whole wizarding newspaper which creates a sense of added credibility for the whole thing. I can keep going with examples here, but you get the idea.

Minimize or maximize outside contact. Like in any fantasy, there is the other side of the coin. The non-fantasy. Not all books have it. Pure fantasy doesn't deal with the outside world, and that is great, it gives you the freedom to operate within the world you created. But if you happen to write a book that does throw characters in the real world, then you have to either, spectacularly describe those interactions, showing how it impacts both sides, or, if you are unsure, which is my case, minimize the contact with the outside world, to avoid situations where you might lose the reader completely, by not supplying enough information on what happens when both world collide. Of course, I'm using a very general simplistic example here, because there are countless books written on the subject. Again, I'm simply sharing with you what I've learned myself so far.

Above all, no matter how fantastic your world is, don't forget the purpose of any story. Your every sentence has to either develop the characters or move the action forward, so if you spend a whole page describing the beauty of the left pinky of one of the purple people after he has applied freshly made crimson coating on it in accordance with an aardvark season tradition of the west bough of the baobab... no matter how divinely it's written, we will yawn, put the book aside, and move on. I'm sure I have missed a gazillion other tricks, so feel free to share your insights in the comments, as always!

Adapt your novel drafts to Beta Readers' feedback. IT RULES.

Photo by Joel Robison

How do you adapt your novel drafts to beta readers' feedback? I get asked this question a lot, because I send out my drafts to Beta Readers to read and give me feedback. A lot. Namely - and I just calculated this - as of today I sent out my drafts to a total of 141 Beta Readers. That's about 40 for Drafts 1, 2, and 3, about 70 for Draft 4, and about 30 so far for Draft 5. Draft 5 is not done yet, so I only sent out a preview of the first 18 Chapters. Now, some people call me crazy, some are outright angry with me and tell me it's a very very bad idea to show your work to strangers when it's not done yet. I disagree. My readers rule. Anything they say rules, because I'm writing my story for them. Without them, my story doesn't exist. It has to be read, to become a story, otherwise it's a sad monologue in my own head, nothing more. This may go against everything you ever heard or read about, so let me illustrate for you how it helped me to write better and you decide for yourself.

The confusion on your Beta Reader's face is priceless. Let's face it, at the very beginning, before anyone else in the wide scary world knows you're writing a book, there is only a handful of people who do. Your family (unless you write at night by flashlight under a blankie) and your closest friends, at least the ones whom you were brave enough to tell and who didn't roll their eyes at the idea. Those are the first people who are willing to suffer through your first crappy drafts, not necessarily because they love your story, but because they love you. And, after having read your story, they might fall in love with it too. Here comes the beautiful part. When you meet them, after they've read your stuff, the questions they ask make no sense to you, and that look of confusion on their face? Yeah, you got it. Now, write down every single thing they say, then don't change it the way they asked you to, but rather go back to those spots where they were confused. All of them. Every single thing they mentioned, and then in your next Draft simply explain what you meant. We writers are so terrified of over explaining things, that we forget our readers can't read our minds. It took me 10 dear faces to see like that to get it.

No feedback is ever bad, all feedback is awesome. Here comes the bomb, and I'm already ducking because I know you will throw something heavy at me right now, but here is the thing. Every single piece of feedback you get is brilliant. You know why? Because every single piece of feedback comes from someone who spent their time on your story, and they want to help. If they didn't care, they wouldn't have wasted their time. So, even if they hated it, it's great. Don't drill them on why they hated, you'll never see eye to eye on this, instead, ask for one simple question - what page did you stop on? THAT is the page you have to fix. It might be a little thing, it might be a big thing, but there was something there that stopped them, so go back and see what it is. I especialy love negative feedback because the person who is angry is very passionate, so they usually send you this huge e-mail, or, instead, just two quick lines. That is gold. Try to pretend that your story is not your story and see what angered that person so much. I can guarantee you that after a few of these you will start seeing a pattern, people repeating certain things. Once you have that jolt of recognition in your gut, that's it, you need to fix it. Your gut will tell you what and your gut is always right.

The more feedback, the better. This is now truly irritating you, isn't it? I mean, it's hard to deal with 10 people, how the hell are you supposed to deal with 100 people? And write at the same time? It's madness! Well, here is the deal, the more people read your story, the more feedback you will be able to see to sift through the 80-20 rule, you know, the one where if 8 people out of 10 tell you the same thing, it means you really need to do it? Yeah, that's the one. If you only send your draft to 6 people, it's hard to judge by their individual responses, plus, you will waste a lot of your personal time going over their feedback in detail. Don't. Quickly read it, absord it, don't take any notes, read the next piece of feedback, and so on. Soon the important things, the theme, so to say, will emerge. For example, for me, especially for Draft 4, it was the immaturity of the main character that was attributed to her being 16 yet calling her mother Mommy and her father Daddy. I changed it in Draft 5. And another thing was me going into these poetic side notes that had nothing to do with the story and slowed it down. I cut most of them out from Draft 5 (well, still in the process of cutting). See, only 2 major things! You can compare Draft 4 and Draft 5 excerpts as an example. You should've seen how many different ways people told me the same information, over and over and over. 

Beta Reader's feedback is just that, Beta Reader's feedback. Never forget that it's all there is to it, it's simply people who have their own opinions. Don't take it seriously, don't get all wounded and upset, simply try feeling it, try noting commonality in people's opinions. They are not attacking you, they want to help. Sometimes they don't know how to do it right, so it might come across as trashing. It's not. It's simply an opinion. At the end of the day, if someone's feedback made absolutely no sense to you, don't get stuck on it, let it go and move on to the next. Because if you don't, you will never be able to use these opinions effectively. It's like with writing, you have to keep writing every day, keep moving forward every day, without looking back, without rewriting what you wrote yesterday, because otherwise you might never finish your Draft at all. 

There you have it. Have fun. Post an excerpt to your novel on your blog, not more than 1,000 words so people have enough time to read it while they sip their cup of coffee, and then ask anyone who would be interested if they'd beta read the whole thing. Forget about copyright, send it out to anyone who will read it. Not only will you get great feedback, you will potentially meet your future readers who will shell out their hard-earned cash for your book when it's done. BECAUSE YOU LISTENED TO THEM. Because they feel like they've taken a part in creating your story. Because, even though you're the one writing your novel, in the end, it takes a village. So go ahead, share, and make your story better!

And now, ladies and gentlemen, you may kill me in comments. Go on. Don't be shy.