festina lente

When I started my novel writing project, I thought it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to figure out. After all, I had plenty of prior experience writing short fiction, poetry, academic papers--hell, I'd even taught writing courses. How much different could a novel possibly be?

As I've come to learn over the last few months, a whole lot different. After all of my early novel starts hit dead end after dead end, I tried consulting some books on novel writing (typical researchaholic thinking, I suppose: when in doubt, hit the books). I'll spare you all a tedious recounting of each and every book I consulted, but the one that had the biggest impact was No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, the guy who started National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it's more commonly known, but I hate cutesy abbreviations so I refuse to call it that). No Plot? No Problem! advocates writing novels in a breakneck, marathon fashion wherein the goal is the completion of a 50,000 word manuscript with a deadline of thirty days. To this end, Baty offers plenty of tips and strategies and makes the whole thing sound fun and interesting, which it is, at least at first.

When I tried Baty's method, I managed to produce plenty of text, but about two weeks in I began to realize that the increased output didn't matter because every last thing I wrote was crap. Not a damn bit of it was usable, and I ended up discarding everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to badmouth the approach--according to the National Novel Writing Month website, in the last ten years over 70,000¹ participants have met the 30 day/50,000 word deadline, so it's clearly effective for some writers. What the experience underscored for me was that other people's writing strategies were just that: strategies that worked for other people. I needed to learn how I write novels, and the only person who could teach me that was me.

I began trying out writing strategies of my own devising, mixing and matching various techniques and schedules, and in the process discovered a great many ways how not to write a novel. But I stuck with it, and a few weeks ago I finally hit on a solution that works for me: notes. I don't mean a few here and there, I mean lots of notes. Tons of notes. Notes piling in snowdrifts around the room and threatening to trap pets and small children in avalanches. Okay, so maybe my note output isn't quite that out of control, but on average I write about three to five pages of notes for every one page of fiction. The reason for that disparity is partly because writing all those notes gets helps me get rid of the squirrely extraneous stuff bouncing around in my head so that it doesn't muck up the fiction, but mostly it's because writing them forces me to justify to myself each and every writing decision I make. If I can't identify a solid reason a scene needs to exist, or a plausible motivation for a character's actions, then the idea in question doesn't get written. I talk myself out of writing a great many things these days, but the things that do get written are more effective, more substantial. And best of all, I rarely have to discard anything.

¹Granted, the National Novel Writing Month website lists only 37 participant-written novels that have gone on to be published, giving the whole endeavor a discouraging .0005% publication rate, but I have a feeling the written to published ratio isn't much better for all the non-marathon written novels written out there.