Coorlim’s Guide to NaNoWriMo 17: Beyond NaNoWriMo

Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month

Coorlim’s Guide to NaNoWriMo is a multi-part series on writing, creativity, and the work-life balance throughout the month of November. Today we’re talking about what comes next.

Okay, stop writing. NaNoWrimo’s over.

Kidding. The writing never ends.

If you’ve kept up with your word count, you should have a 50,000 word rough draft in your hands. What should you do with it?

1. Keep Writing

Maybe you’re not done yet. That’s fine. Just keep writing until you reach the end. Maybe the novel’s a little thin, and you feel it can use a little more meat. Or maybe you’re trying to hit a specific word count.

What to add? More scenes. You can add detail when you revise, but if you want a longer novel, your best bet isn’t padding, it’s making more things happen.

Just make sure you know when to end your story. Don’t ramble on forever. Elegance is the practice of including only what’s necessary, and not a single word more. It’s a skill! Learn it!

But don’t lose your momentum. The pressures of NaNoWriMo might be easing up, but don’t let that excuse you from maintaining a strong daily wordcount. Find a rate that works for you, with your schedules and priorities, and stick to it. Consistency is far more important than setting a high daily goal; once you’ve got yourself writing every day, then you can worry about how many words that comes out to.

While building that consistency, one good idea is to not set a wordcount quota at all. Instead, give yourself an hour or two where you’re either staring at a blank page, or you’re writing. No internet. No games. No getting up to do chores or distract yourself.

It’s writing time, dammit.

Then, when that habit is natural for you, focus on productively using that time to increase your wordcount.

2. Revise your work

If your draft is done, it’s time to revise it. Not now, though. Not while it’s fresh. You’ll need to come to it with an entirely different, more critical mindset. Throw it in a drawer, let it simmer, and come back to it a week or a month from now.

I’ll cover this in more detail in the last post in this series, and yes, I’m intentionally forcing you to wait for it.

In the meantime, write something else. Read a few good books. But keep writing other projects so you don’t lose that momentum we talked about.

3. Trash it

Maybe you think it sucks. Maybe you’re right. I’d still advise you to revise it just for the practice of going through that process, and hey, maybe you’ll fix whatever it’s problems are. But if you absolutely cannot stand it, don’t waste time beating a dead horse.

Write something else.

Your work’s final destination

After revision (which we’ll cover next time), give it to someone to read. Your beta reader, or just a friend with stronger grammatical skills than your own. You’ll always be too close to the material to properly judge it or catch all your errors, and the more eyes on, the better.

Take their comments into consideration, but remember: You’re the writer. They might be wrong about why they don’t like a passage, but they’re write about the fact that it bothers them.

After you’ve got their input, do another revision pass.

Then stop. There’s a quote from the French philosopher Voltaire I like to share:

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

There’s this flawed image of the writer toiling away at the perfect masterpiece for years and years, but for the most part that’s utter bullshit. Finish your projects, then move on. Perfectionism is not an asset in creative lines of work. Remember, a writer is remembered for his or her body of work, not just the one book they wrote that one time.

So finish. Move on. Don’t dwell. Don’t bask (for too long). Keep writing.

 

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

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