Guest Post: Writing Lessons from a NaNoWriMo Trial Run
In this month’s guest post, Lila Krishna shares her experiences giving NaNoWriMo a test run in September as part of her NaNoPrep. Lila is a co-founder of TL;DR Press, writer of contemporary/slice-of-life stories, and a blogger over on Medium.
I’m a NaNo-NotYet. I’ve attempted NaNoWriMo for the past three years, but haven’t managed to write anything more than 5000 words. Reflecting on why, I came up with four reasons:
– Lack of a disciplined writing habit
– My plots get tied up in knots, and I end up stuck with analysis-paralysis.
– I didn’t have a consistent group to drum up enthusiasm and create accountability.
– Life Happens.
Since last November, I’ve co-founded TL;DR Press, a community by and for emerging writers. It’s mainly a Slack group (with a Twitter for promotion), and we collaborate on bringing out themed quarterlies. I most recently helped with Women’s Anthology — Carrying Fire, which is on sale now. We also have a horror collection, titled Nope Coming out by Halloween. I’m currently curating a collection of family themed stories, and we want submissions! Otherwise, we help each other submit to venues, beta-read each other’s writing, and in general it’s nice to have a group for writerly things.
Now that TL;DR Press is a thriving group with more than a 100 users, having a community for enthusiasm and accountability is no longer an issue. I feel more confident about NaNo this year, but I wanted a trial run to iron out the kinks in my writing process before the big month.
I thought of a month-long contest called 30 Prompts Hath September, which was brought to life wonderfully by everyone on our Slack channel. We posted one prompt a day, and contestants could write on prompt, and each day they wrote would be a ticket for a lucky draw at the end of the month. I hoped to give it my best shot, without the pressure of NaNo, and become aware of and fix any issues with discipline and writing process before NaNo began.
This is what I learned:
Concepts are easy. Plotting is hard. (So learn to love caterpillars)
A world where no questions are allowed. A world where you could see the date everyone is supposed to die. A train station where it’s raining and the last train is late. This is the easy part. Just googling for writing prompts brings up a few thousand such ideas. What do you do with them, though?
Sure, you can start writing, but don’t expect a cogent plot to just turn up when you’re thinking of such a concept. Even if it does, you might not be intrigued enough by it to spend enough time doing it justice. Often, a lot of exploration is necessary to find the characters you find interesting, and a plot you care enough about to spend days on. I quickly found that there’s only a small subset of prompts that brought out stories in me that were a joy to write. The rest, I choose to call them plot-caterpillars (plotterpillars, if you’d rather) — they have potential and can wiggle around, but you need to feed them lots of leaves, and eventually, they need to stay in a chrysalis until they become a beautiful plot-butterfly (or plotterfly). Which leads to my next point…
Everything is derivative. (So get a Pinterest)
You know how when you pitch in Hollywood, you’re supposed to describe your idea as ‘X meets Y’? That’s how our brains make sense of new ideas and concepts. I realized quickly that my stories often originated in real life events I witnessed or heard about, or plots in books and movies I wish had gone differently. Most of my ideas are an improvement on something that was already on my mind. ‘Original’ is not necessarily a unique concept, but more likely a unique mashup of previously existing concepts.
Which means, you’ll have more interesting ideas and plots to write about if you expose yourself to more and newer thoughts and ideas. Read a lot, and diversely. That includes nonfiction — most of Life of Pi’s adrift-on-a-raft part was from Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. Go to places, and pay attention to things happening around you — After a walk around the museums around San Francisco’s seaside, I thought up a plot about a longshoreman on the Barbary coast who gets Shanghaied, and his great-grandson who’s fighting high rents in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood.
Keep a journal, or a corkboard, or even a few Pinterest boards of plot-caterpillars. Looking at all of them together can have them cross-pollinate in a multitude of ways, that your next plot will come to you quite organically.
This kind of a pre-made source of writing inspiration and plots can be quite important, considering…
Life Happens. (So stop expecting perfect weather in November)
When #30PromptsHathSeptember began, I set things up such that my commute was minimal, my work was on autopilot, and heck, I even had a pretty new notebook to write in. None of that ended up mattering; my evenings and weekends in September ended up being dedicated to another personal issue I hadn’t anticipated, leaving very little time and energy for writing. I reflected about how something would come up each time I decided to concentrate on writing. The more I tried reasoning about it, the more I realized life is always happening!
There’s no perfect time to write. I can long for a sunny morning where I can sip hot chocolate and write with lilting instrumental tunes in the background, but those tend to be rare in November in San Francisco, and even if they weren’t, I’d probably spend most of them in meetings anyway.
I need to find time to write whenever I can, to get to a place where I can write full time. I’m writing this on my hour-long commute home. That’s in direct contrast to NaNo two years ago, where I decided a commute is no place to write. Reflecting on this over the past month, I realized I had trouble getting started while on a train surrounded by strangers. But if I got started at the cute little coffee shop by work for a half hour, I could maintain the momentum on the ride home.
I never would write before bed, because screens before bed are bad for my sleep cycle. However, I realized I could draft and outline in a notebook, in preparation to write in other moments when I had time but no inspiration.
Focusing on WHY a particular writing time is bad, and finding ways around it is how people with full-time jobs and families can manage their writing habit. I don’t yet feel I’m doing a good enough job of this, but the important thing is to try and evolve.
Writing in mundane moments also serves to make writing a lot less intimidating. And this is important because
Everyone is better than you. (So befriend them)
My fellow writers on #30PromptsHathSeptember were all veritable story-factories. They managed to take the smallest inspiration and turn it into the most exciting flash fiction. Several of them managed to write everyday.
When I decided to do NaNoWriMo right last year, I went to all the meetups and prep events, and everyone had at least one thing (usually more) they were better than me at — marketing, audience, writing quality, discipline, consistency… you name it.
All of this is enough to make me feel like there’s no point in me writing, and that everything I want to say has already been said before or is being said by people who are saying it better than I can. If you tune into a large scene in any field, you’re bound to experience this.
However, others’ writing isn’t going to get me published, or up my bank balance, or feed the hunger in me that makes me write. I still need to keep writing, and I cannot afford to be intimidated by factors that have nothing to do with me.
Learning from others is a great help to keep writing. How others manage their time, working relationships and craft is a great repository of ideas for how to improve my own time management, working style and craft. And when you add helping others with things they find difficult, and collaborating with others on projects, it turns out that writing doesn’t have to be a lonely enterprise. It’s much better when you are around a lot of writing and ideas. Plus, when you consider that you have a unique pinboard with all your ideas and influences on it to draw from, you probably have something unique to contribute that no one else does.
To summarize:
NaNoWriMo is more a test of discipline and confidence in your writing than of writing skill. Focus on factors that improve both of those aspects, like developing a writing habit, finding peers for support and collaboration, and preparing your writing inspiration ahead of time, and NaNoWriMo will be a much easier task.
Happy Writing!
If you loved this guest post, give Lila some love over at @lilastories! You can also check out her short stories and blog posts over on her Medium.
Interested in writing a future guest post? Send a query to tldrpress@gmail.com with the subject “Guest Post Inquiry” or send a direct message to @TLDRpress.