Writing Fast, and Furious, and 50,000 words

Every year I tell myself I can’t/shouldn’t rely on the special NaNoWriMo magic to get my deadlines done. Because, you know, what are the odds that I’ll manage to write 50K words in a month every single year?

And yet. Every year that I genuinely make the effort, it comes off well.

If I could do NaNo four times a year, I would. But I’ve tried the alternatives and really, it only works in November. Which is crazy, because November is a terrible time for writing. In Australia it’s the end of the university year, not the middle – I have an annual two week job that overlaps with NaNo. There are so many other things that tend to collide – this year it was the coverage of Jessica Jones for Tor.com. Next year it will be something else. In 2009 I’d just had a baby, it was crazy to even try…

But the secret it, it’s always a bad month for writing. I have kids, I have commitments, I have all manner of things that leap up and demand attention. My email inbox is enough to make anyone cry.

NaNoWriMo works for me, and it works mostly because of a combined magical cocktail of pressure and obligation. The words get written. They get written fast. And (here’s my own personal secret) they get written good.

I do my best writing when writing fast and furious. I can’t sustain the NaNo level of writing fiction – not without completely destroying my relationship with my children and partner, or the other important facets of my life. A good month of writing for me normally is 20K – a great month is 30K. 10K is keeping my head above water.

These metrics make no sense, of course, but writers often hold to them because without some kind of metric to prove progress, it’s easy to go spinning off into space without a safety harness.

My writing is at its best when it’s fast. I wrote more in the first half of this year than the second because I was writing Musketeer Space as an ongoing serial – my momentum was up, so letting the fingers fly across they keys released almost felt like NaNo levels of magic. Books I have written fast tend to need less editing at the other end. I don’t know how or why this works – it’s something that’s mostly true for me, except when it isn’t.

My Victorian fairy novel in progress, Flavia Wednesday, has suffered because I found out a year or two ago that it was a novel that simply could not be written fast. Whenever I tried, it broke. So I had to teach myself to write differently for that one – painstaking and thoughtful, one piece at a time. It’s still not finished, though it’s getting close. I struggled to build proper momentum on it, only to discover that it’s a novel that defies writing speed.

Normally, it takes me at least a month of working on a project to get up to a decent turn of “speed” and let the words take over. Writing the third book of my Creature Court trilogy was agonising because I had interruptions – usually edits for the middle book – every month or so, which meant it took me what felt like forever to reach the optimum cruising speed for getting it properly written.

Every book is different – and I can write well when writing slowly, but it takes more layers, more editing, more fixing.

My first drafts are cleaner when I’m writing a mile a minute. The writing days when I get my words done in an hour instead of in three, often have results I am happier with weeks or months later.

It’s frustrating as hell, to know this about myself, and not really understand it. It’s like that time that I got the best mark on an essay at college with the one I wrote in an hour while I had a cold.

Anyway, NaNoWriMo works for me because it forces me to hit that magical momentum point when a book falls out of my head in somewhat better shape than they usually emerge. The closest analogy I have is – it took me a long time to learn how to drive. It is one of the hardest things I ever did. I pushed way past my comfort zone to get there, I failed multiple times, and eventually I scraped my license.

Everyone told me that at some point, driving would be easy, and that seemed impossible, but these days I don’t even think about it, not really. I just drive. I’m pretty good at it. The stress of the task is mostly gone – stressful moments occur while driving, but the basic skills are there and invisible.

Writing is not easy. But sometimes it is. The benefit of something like NaNo is that it forces me to write even when it’s not easy. (If I did this all year around I’m pretty sure I would break something internal but it’s good for me to do this one month a year) The other benefit is that it sets me up to make the most of the days when it’s easy – and to write and write until the easy point arrives. (sometimes it doesn’t, hence internal breakages)

I wrote a lot of words this year – over 200K and counting – and some of them were good. Some of them took less time than others. I even finished some things – and I plan to finish at least one more thing before the end of the year. So I’m doing OK, I think.