Coffee & Conversation: What to do with your Nanowrimo novel?

06 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

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advice, answer, author, editing, essay, nanowrimo, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice

What to do with your Nanowrimo novel?

Or any other novel that you may have written in a short span of time.

No matter how well we write or how many hours we’ve spent on something, when we work on a project in a condensed period of time, we’re very liable to miss things. We’re simply too close. We know what words should be there. We know what the descriptions are trying to say. We understand what the dialogue is referring to. We know. Because it’s all in our heads and not just on the paper.

The best thing to do is set the story aside for a time. Put it in a drawer, label it draft one and give yourself a specific date when you can take it back out. I recommend something between 4 to 12 weeks. During that time, work on other projects, get your brain away, far away, from the project you just finished. That way, when you come back, you’ll be fresh.

Another really good piece of information to know is that agents and editors are often a little wary about the influx of stories they receive in December and January, thinking that these new novels/queries are messy Nanowrimo novels. So it’s best to give yourself a little time and space away from that bias.

Once you’ve come back to the story, do a thorough edit. You should have forgotten the words by this point and be reading things fresh, allowing you to catch descriptions that aren’t clear enough, words that could be read in two different ways, plot threads that end up not going anywhere, characters that switch personalities, etc.

After your edits, you can send out to your beta reader if you want, get a critique, do more edits, craft a pitch and a query, etc. Do all the things to liven up your novel and get it ready for submission (or publication).

One thing you don’t want to do is forget about your novel. Don’t let it sit forever. Make sure you have that date to go back to it. Make sure you open it back up knowing that it will need work, but that it isn’t awful and anything wrong can be fixed. That you do have something worthwhile in your hands. Don’t abandon it.

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: How many times have you won Nanowrimo?

29 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

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answer, author, essay, goals, nanowrimo, national novel writing month, non-fiction, nonfiction, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing

How many times have you won Nanowrimo?

I’ve only won once. And it was with the first 82k or so words of Haunt of the Wilds.

I was actually supposed to be working on a different novel and Haunt was just going to be a quick practice to get the rust out of my brain. And then I just…kept going. No biggie.

It was also rather helpful to have my partner suspended for that month (tongue in cheek–it was a very stressful month) because it meant that I got a huge amount of time every day to write.

Every other year that I’ve attempted to write 50k in a month, I haven’t made it. I’m pretty sure a bunch of the reason is because of not having all that extra time to write. But also, I’m rarely excited going into November to work on something. I’m usually in the muddy middle, so really I’m just operating at writing as usual, same old habits, getting my typical amount done as I do every other month while I’m knee-deep in a project.

If I finish a project during November, that adds another sticking point, for it’s difficult to immediately jump from one project to the next (at least for me) without some form of reset. The beginning might be slow. I’m probably still heavily thinking about my last story instead of my new story. I may have a few things that have fallen by the wayside that need to be caught up on.

There’s also the possibility of interruption during the month and interruption is the key killer of motivation and advancement.

Either way, winning Nano isn’t the end goal for me. It’s about making sure I’m keeping up my habits and hopefully tweaking them to be better habits.

If you are doing Nanowrimo this year or are working on some other large project, I wish you all the luck and organization to keep yourself focused and moving forward on it!

And if you fail, you will be far further than you were, and that is a success in and of itself :)

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: How fast do you write?

08 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

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answer, author, essay, nanowrimo, non-fiction, nonfiction, Novel, prose, question, reading, writer, Writing, writing advice, writing speed

How fast do you write?

This is one of those trick questions :)

I talked about how nebulous it is to talk about writing a novel based on months and years and that generally hours is a better method for counting your progress. Hours will also help you get an idea of how many words you can write in a given period of time if you keep track of your time spent and progress made.

The average word count per hour across writers is something like 500 words.

Some writers I know can dump 1000 to 3000 words each hour onto the page. Generally these are writers who are big into editing or they are over-writers who then go back and cull many of those words back out. Not always, of course. Some of these writers have simply been heavily thinking about their scene for a long time so when they sit down, the scene flows out incredibly quickly.

Other writers are like me, and we write anywhere between 250-600 words per hour. For me, specifically, this is because I have a tendency to cycle. Cycling means one doesn’t start at the last sentence from the previous session, but rather goes back a chapter or scene and begins there. I’ll read and tweak and edit as I go and then when I get to where I left off last time, I’ll continue on, but now I’m immersed in the world and can get more words out. If I’m working through a full other hour or two, then my word count will go up during those hours because I’m no longer having the time-sink of the cycle. However! This means I’ll have more words to go through during my next writing session, so it’s a give and take.

I don’t mind being a writer with an average writing speed/slower writer because I get a ton of editing done during the writing phase, which gives me great pleasure because I’m not the biggest fan of editing once the story has all the words in place. At that point, I’m eager to be done and moved on to something else and must force myself to focus on clean up. As a metaphor, it’s like waking up the next morning after a party–if you clean up during the evening as things progress, clean up doesn’t seem too bad, but when you wake up and there’s a ton to do, you’re just…tired before you even start in on it all.

So I am not a fast writer by any means. If I want to draft something quickly, I must spend a great many hours on the project in a condensed time frame.

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: What is a Nanowrimo novel?

01 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Emmi Lawrence in Coffee & Conversation

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answer, author, essay, goals, nanowrimo, national novel writing month, Novel, prose, question, writer, Writing, writing advice

What is a Nanowrimo novel?

A novel written during the National Novel Writing Month (November), where people are urged to set themselves goals, the lead one being to write 50k words in 30 days.

A lot of people look down on events such as Nanowrimo. They call the books or partial books written during that focused time “brain dumps” or far worse. There are even submission guidelines by editors and agents that specifically demand not to be sent your “Nanowrimo mess” as if November is the only time that one might be able to write a mess of a novel or that if a novel is written in a month it must therefore be, a mess.

Thing is…a month is an incredibly arbitrary span of time.

What is a month? It’s four weeks. It’s 28 to 31 days. It’s 672 to 744 hours. It’s 40, 320 to 44,640 minutes.

So, when you say you wrote a novel in a month, are you saying that you spent 40,000 minutes on that novel? Did you spend 700 hours on that novel? No, of course not! (i mean, unless you never sleep or do absolutely anything else during the month.)

So what does saying “I wrote this novel in a month” actually mean?? What does saying that you spent two years working on a novel mean??

Well, in fact, they could actually mean the exact same thing. Or, they could mean nothing at all.

If, say, a person decided to spend one month working a novel, by which they decided to spend a grand total of 4 hours each evening instead of watching TV or going out or reading or any other leisure activity, by the end of the month they will have written during a total of 120 hours during that month.

If, say, a person decided to write a novel and only spent 1 hour a week over the course of two years, they would have spent 104 hours during those two years. Continue reading →