How I Turned a NaNoWriMo Failure into a Successful Learning Experience

Earlier this year I decided I was going to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  The idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel from start to finish all within the month of November.  I didn’t come anywhere even remotely close to finishing.  If NaNoWriMo was a cross-country race from Liberal, KS to Washington, D.C. (1458 miles) I would have only made it 87 miles.  Not exactly a stellar effort.  However, I’m still calling the experience a success, and because I learned a lot about my writing over the course of that month.

I found out I like outlining.

Generally speaking, there are two types of writers.  Outliners and Discovery Writers. Outliners are exactly what they sound like – people who make outlines.  Discovery writers are the ones who sit down and just let things flow onto the paper or computer screen as they form in the writer’s mind.  I’d only written short fiction before NaNoWriMo and I leaned more toward discovery writing.  I decided since I had never taken on a project as big as a 50k word novel, I’d try and outline the plot to keep me a little more organized.

I searched around the internet for a while looking at different ways novels are outlined, and I soon learned there are about as many ways to do an outline as there are writers.  Eventually I settled on outlining the book chapter by chapter and including various scenes I wanted in the book.  It was at that point when I learned that I was definitely an outliner.  Over the month of October I’d sit down at my computer and brain storm scenes and find out where they would best fit within the story, and I had a blast doing it.  By the end of the October I had it planned out to be around 20 chapters or so, and I was pretty pleased with where the plot was going.   Getting to sit back and look at the big outline I made already had me feeling like I had accomplished something.

The story grew bigger than I expected.

Looking above at the section on all I learned about outlining, someone might think, “Well if the whole book was planned out before you started, why didn’t you write more?”  Good question.   The thing that really derailed me was that I kept going back and messing around with the outline instead of writing the story I came up with.  The fist day I got off to a great start and got my first chapter written and everything was great.  However, then I started thinking about other cool things that could happen, and those things sounded way cooler than what I already planned but wouldn’t fit within my outline.  So I went back and started messing around with the outline more.

This happened constantly over the first week and a half.  In order to finish your 50K words in the month you need to average 1,667 words a day.  After ten days I had 3,000 words because instead of writing, I was tinkering with my outline.  While I was changing the direction of the story over and over again, I was adding more characters, making some characters more important than I’d planned, getting rid of others who I thought would be major impact characters in the story, and debating whether or not I wanted to work in a love interest into the story.  After several days of that, it was obvious that the simple story I’d originally planned for NaNoWriMo had turned into something that was just too huge to take on in a month.  Which led me to the next big discovery about the project.

I wasn’t ready for a project this big.

I’ve wanted to write a novel since I was a teenager, and as I mentioned previously, all I’d written was short fiction.  Writing short fiction is great.  It’s fun, you get lots of practice doing different things with plot, character, and language, and it’s something that you can do over the course of an evening or a week.  It was not a good idea for me to try and write my first novel in 30 days.    It was demoralizing when I looked up and saw that I was 15K words behind schedule. 

The funk didn’t last long, but there was definitely a funk.  For a few days I didn’t go anywhere near my office and I wouldn’t talk about my book with anyone.  I kept thinking that I’d wasted so much time messing around with the outline that I’d never finish.  Luckily that self-pitying only lasted a day or so, before I was able to pick myself back up and re-evaluate what I was going to do for the rest of the month.

I signed up to learn and have fun.  So I was going to keep learning and having fun.

I came to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to finish the book that month.  It didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to finish it ever.  I’d had so much fun planning, outlining, and world building that book that it would be a shame to give up on it.  So I looked at what had become of my simple 20 chapter fantasy novel.  I looked at the changes I’d already made and looked at my notebook where I jotted down changes I’d been debating.  The book became something so much bigger than I’d ever thought of initially. 

So I decided I was going to just go back into planning mode and not worry about writing another word of the actual story.   As I planned I made notes to myself about characters, plot, and worlds that were going to make up the story.  I identified things that I need to do a lot of work with, and what kind of research I’d need to do to make the cool things I added to the story make sense.

In the end, I came up with something epic.

What has come out of that experience is the plan for a big epic fantasy series that I’m so excited to write.  However, because that has become so much bigger than what I was ready for, I decided to put that idea on the shelf for a while.  I still pull it out now and then and add some cool ideas that I want to try and work into it, but that particular story is going to wait a little bit for me to get a little more practice.

In the meantime, I’ve started planning an urban fantasy novel that is going to be a lot more low key.  The idea behind this project is to start and finish a novel without the stress of keeping up with daily word counts.  Instead of approaching it like I did NaNoWriMo, I’m going to follow along with one of Brandon Sanderson’s fiction writing classes.  As I mentioned in a previous blog, Mr. Sanderson teaches creative writing at BYU.  In his class, the project they work on the entire semester is completing a novel or novella (depending on the semester).  The coolest part is that the lectures are all on YouTube.  (Here is the link to watch the first couple semesters)  So to keep myself steadily writing and working on this new book, I’m going to follow along with the most recent semester that was posted and approach the novel as if I were writing it for Mr. Sanderson’s class.  Any cool writing exercises or side projects coming from that class will probably be posted on the blog because I think sharing that stuff will be kind of cool.