scarves and sequins

It turns out that Sara Gruen, who is the award-winning author of the amazing book Water for Elephants (which is set around a 1920s American circus, a book I picked up for research purposes for my novel), actually wrote her first novel for NaNoWriMo.

Looking back now on Water for Elephants, I can see how it would easily have been a great pick for a NaNo novel. It has a very straight-edged and uncomplicated plot centred mostly around the characters involved. It didn't take a lot of world-building, just research. There isn't a cast of thousands. There's a relatively happy ending (not that a happy ending is mandatory but that it's easier to tie up than a wandering novel with sixty themes). It's a stand-alone book and not the beginning of any kind of series.

She has four fairly successful books. She's a great writer.

But I still don't really know how I feel about NaNoWriMo itself. I signed up to do it once and literally didn't put fingers to the keyboard for it. I couldn't get involved in the buzz. I wanted the daily production of words but I don't think I wanted the pressure of having to tell my entire story in thirty days when I knew that it would take longer than thirty days to really get the entire idea cemented in my head. I suppose I don't really like the idea of having "NaNo Winners" either because it implies that the people who don't "win" are losers even though they clearly try to dissuade that notion.

I also wondered about the editing process. Are we just left floating in a vortex for that? Where are you supposed to get your feedback for the bits you're hacking out? I mean, theoretically you've made friends who'll stay with you through the editing process but it's not the same as a month long crash-course in editing. Then I discovered that there's also NaNoEdMo, the bastard cousin of NaNoWriMo. But! How can you edit in a month? I need a month of stepping away from the story. That's only my personal experience, of course, but it's still true.

Everyone has a different creative process. Some people do better just jumping in with both feet and hammering a book out there. Some people, like me, need to make sure they have all of their research and planning down to a fine art before they decide to wade in. I find it demoralising to get to halfway through a story and discover that I can't go any further because I'm not working in a fantasy world, I'm history bending and that means I need some basic knowledge in every area that I dip my toe into. I couldn't just plod on with a daily word count knowing something might not be just marginally incorrect but absolutely and utterly wrong.

Thinking about NaNoWriMo has, however, helped me to decide what I want to do in terms of word count. I'm going to commit myself to 100 words a day. Once I'm absolutely positive I have the last of my basic, I-can-go-on-with-this-and-learn-more-slowly research in place, I am going to throw myself open to the scorn of the interwebs and say that 100 words a day is doable.

It works out roughly like this:

100 words a day x 365 days + roughly 121 days where we'll estimate that I'll do 200 words because I am inspired = 48,600

There's no way that every day I'll only do 100 words every day. Some days I'll probably do 1000 because I'm inspired and the scene jumped on my head. But by saying 100 words, it means that on those days where I have decided that I'm absolute crap, my writing isn't going anywhere and I should give up right now, I'll have something to point at and say "progress" – even when it's cruddy progress.