My NaNoWriMo Was a Train Wreck

Today’s post is by author Elinor Florence.

Several years ago, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, a creative writing event known as NaNoWriMo.

I joined hundreds of thousands of other writers around the planet who tackled the ambitious goal of completing a 50,000-word novel in thirty days.

In one sense, I was successful. I dutifully churned out 2,000 words a day and at the end of the month, I had a 60,000-word first draft.

That was a mistake I will never make again.

Leaving the station

I began to research the concept for my historical novel seven months earlier, on April 1, 2020. By the time November rolled around I had read dozens of books, recorded a raft of notes, and dreamed up a story. I mistakenly believed I was ready to start writing.

Set in 1905, my novel titled Finding Flora concerns a Scottish newlywed who jumps off the train in the middle of the night to escape from her abusive husband, and finds herself alone on the vast prairie. Flora claims a homestead and endures the deprivations of pioneer life, supported in her struggles by several female neighbours including an American couple, a Welsh widow, and a Métis woman.

On the first day of November, I happily wrote the first thrilling chapter, in which Flora leaps from the train.

From there, it was all downhill.

Wheels coming off

Almost immediately, I realized I needed more of the details that lend authenticity to every work of historical fiction. For example, I had located an old train schedule, but I had no idea what a sleeping compartment in a steam train looked like. I had researched the climate, but not what Flora might be wearing. Each time I hit a snag, I wrote (while swearing in my head) “blankety, blank, blank.”

My greatest challenge was Jessie, the Indigenous character. I had no concept of how she would have spoken and behaved in that time period. I was mortally afraid of writing the wrong thing and betraying my own Indigenous heritage.

But there were larger factual issues, ones that impacted the plot. For example, what were the government’s conditions for filing on a homestead and more importantly, keeping it? The time crunch led me to fabricate laws that later proved to be totally incorrect and resulted in massive headaches.

The storyline was another tangled web. I had imagined the book in broad strokes only, so I started each morning with no clue about what to write next. Nevertheless, I plodded along day after day, filling my word quota.

Screeching to a halt

At the end of the month, I had a shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott calls it. This one was beyond shitty. It was so badly written, so amateurish, that I moaned aloud when I reread it. The piece had no continuity, no rising tension, and no climax. It was little more than a jumble of scenes occupied by wooden characters.

I was so demoralized that I digitally shelved the manuscript for a year, hiding it under several layers of desktop folders, convinced that I never wanted to see the loathsome thing again.

Getting back on track

A year later, my writing buddies who liked the story idea urged me to revisit it. With the utmost reluctance, I fired up the literary boiler. I knew this revision would require more effort than putting lipstick on a pig. I would have to resurrect an entire porker from the dead.

Rewriting was far more difficult than firing off that scattergun first draft. I discovered untold flaws, consulted additional sources, and rewrote almost every scene. That took me four months.

I then submitted it to an Indigenous sensitivity editor. Thankfully she didn’t find anything offensive, but she red-flagged about a dozen instances that needed attention. (For example, I had Jessie wearing mukluks instead of moccasins—mukluks were not worn by Plains Cree in 1905.)

With those corrections made, I hired a professional developmental editor. She identified several major plot inconsistencies, a direct result of my overreliance on that dreadful first draft to drive the action. All too often, I had driven it recklessly in the wrong direction. Those revisions took a further three months of gruelling labor.

Finally, I felt ready to submit Finding Flora to a publisher. To my delight, Simon & Schuster offered me a contract!

But that didn’t mean my work was done. The publisher launched yet another structural edit. The story was told from two points of view, and my new editor tasked me with removing the second POV altogether. That took weeks of swearing and hair-tearing as I struggled to find other means of revealing the information previously relayed through the second character.

Reaching the stationBookshop • Amazon

My novel finally arrived at its final destination. Finding Flora will hit the bookstores on April 1, 2025—exactly five years to the fateful day when I started working on the book.

The only thing that remains of my original manuscript is the first chapter and that, too, has been rewritten multiple times. The plot now makes sense, the characters are fully developed, and, thanks to my slavish attention to historical detail, it has the ring of authenticity.

However, I believe I could have achieved this level of excellence much sooner, and with far less angst. Because of my NaNoWriMo, I estimate that I lost about two years.

In fairness, perhaps historical fiction isn’t the right genre for writing a speedy first draft. Perhaps a fantasy or a romance author might have more success. Surely NaNoWriMo wouldn’t be so popular if it didn’t work for so many people.

But if you are currently participating in this massive exercise, or plan to tackle it in future, these are my suggestions for a better experience.

1. Create a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene outline. The quick-and-dirty process is better suited to pantsters than plotters like me. Creative ideas come thick and fast when you are forced to sit at your computer every day—in my case, too many ideas. I needed a blueprint to keep me on track. Prepare as detailed a plot as possible.

2. Do the bulk of your research ahead of time—preferably all of it. There’s nothing to take your head out of the game and waste precious hours like the necessity to look something up, especially if you absolutely must get it right from the get-go. Facts form the foundation of fiction.

3. Don’t imagine you will have anything resembling a finished book at the end of November. Unless you are a gifted writer, be prepared to spend weeks, perhaps months, tearing apart and rewriting your first draft.

4. Finally, don’t hesitate to give up in the middle of the month. My own reluctance to throw in the towel caused me months of unnecessary work and frustration trying to get my novel back on the right track.

I’m currently pondering my next novel, but I will never again make the fatal mistake of trying to write a first draft in thirty days.