“In My End is My Beginning”: the Post-Camp Novel Effort

Now that the frenzy of Camp NaNoWriMo has passed, it’s time to figure out what’s next! That could be anything from taking a break from your manuscript to diving right into edits or revisions. Today, participant Susan Tait shares her plan for post-Camp noveling:

I feel stunned. In the afterglow of “I really did write 52,000 words in a month!” the post-Camp effort of organizing my writing feels like trying to unload hastily-packed boxes after moving to a new house. There’s all this stuff that got crammed in during the fury to finish.  

Advice was never-ending and contradictory, so I stopped reading it. It mostly amounted to this:

“Don’t edit while you write! Just get it out!”

“Edit while you write, or you’ll just have a big mess at the end.”

I think they’re both right. The novel’s gotten “out,” but what’s gotten out has more obvious problems than strengths: outline fragments, broken dialogue, zeroes filled in for o’s the week I switched keyboards (how did I forget to review my spelling and grammar more often?), a fantastic idea I remember having but can’t find, paragraphs that “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Acknowledgement for source quotes and research notes is so far behind that it feels like another book. Plus the dawning realization that some of my cardboard characters spitefully defied their assigned roles and did what they wanted to.

Now, in the aftermath, I could:

Put the whole binder in the drawer as evidence of effort, and write a short story that I resist titling, “And Now For Something Completely Different.”Wax philosophical about what I learned, writing a personal development essay that will make it clear to me what I know now that I didn’t then.Rewrite, revise, review. I can do the other two things any time. Perhaps a character with the worst character arc needs a short story to clear things up. Maybe a decision diagram on tracing paper superimposed on a generously sized timeline would show me where things went wrong—or if I’ve actually written some alternative history.

To my surprise, I like what I have enough to pursue polishing the messy draft that I started last month. To pick the advice that’s going to work for me, I need only remember one thing:

Maintain my engagement with my characters while re-engaging with my readers.

Some of my characters are based on real people, others completely invented. They all have a real relationship with me, something like the relationship of befriending people online that you never meet in real life. My characters make me look at how I engage with people and what I project onto them.

It doesn’t matter in what order I fix all the problems with my draft. What matters is that I start a process that will create a community larger than the sum of my novel’s parts: that place where characters and readers meet. The only way to build that is to start where I am, regarding my dirty draft as clean compost.

I adopted my writing motto (and the title of this post) from Mary, Queen of Scots: the end of the dirty draft is the beginning of a new chapter.

Recommended Links:

Looking at a fresh start for content that will integrate easily? Try L.E. DeLano’s suggestion in her recent Swoon post on why you should know what changed for you and your character last month.
I don’t write what I know; I write to find out what I don’t. Sounds like you? This Atlantic column on the value of fiction shores up exploratory writers.
This FAQ with award-winning novelist John Scalzi goes much wider than science fiction—terse, kind, and some of the comments are also pretty funny and helpful.

Susan’s first novel collapsed into a short story that she round-filed. It taught her enough to succeed at her second novel, which she wrote during NaNoWriMo 2017, and finished during the Now What? Months in February 2018. Fountain pen fiend, amateur painter, past winner of two Writer’s Digest competitions, and a certified scrum master, she lives in Oregon with her husband, son, and three cats. See more about her on LinkedIn.

Top image licensed under Creative Commons from Sandy/Chuck Harris on Flickr.