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NaNoWriMo, Week 1!

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Me with the 1st draft of my handwritten-in-prison, epic animal liberation political thriller: The Liberators, 1,600 pages!

Me with the 1st draft of my handwritten-in-prison, epic animal liberation political thriller: The Liberators, 1,600 pages!

The first week of NaNoWriMo has passed.  Read my previous blog to see how I’m doing things a little differently.  In a nutshell, I’m not trying to write a novel, because I was already well into writing my prison memoir Rebel Hell:  Doin’ Time For Barely a Crime when November began.  So my goal was to write at least a novel’s worth of words on the memoir this month (50,000 words).  And so far it looks like I’m on track!!

 

I started the month with 96,000 words written.  I’m now at about 112,000, meaning 16,000 words written in 8 days.  2k/day on average, which puts me well on my way to accomplishing my personal challenge.  I’m also very pleased with what I’ve been writing.  This is by far my most experimental book; I’m trying to craft a Januscript that, in the reading of it, makes the reader feel like they’re actually feel certain elements of the prison experience.  Mainly the way it creates in the Inmate’s mind a certain sense of the malleability of time.  So I’m using footnotes and flashbacks and flip-flopping chronology and dreams to try to mirror those sensations for the reader, and I’m pretty pleased so far with how I’m doing—especially since it’s just a first draft and I’m writing fiendishly!  It also happens to be (I think) very, very funny.  Funny in pitch dark, irreverent, grotesque, heart-wrenching ways.  Which is exactly what I’m going for!

 

I tend to heavily overwrite on my first drafts; I’m not always sure what I want to say, or what I want to happen.  So I kind of “doodle” my way toward the (soy-) meat of the scenes and the socio-political themes.  Then, in the second draft, I edit heavily, with the aim of cutting at least 20 percent or so.  Couple examples:  The first draft of my (rewritten) first novel High Society was about 355 pages, and now it’s at 285 (24.5% cut).  The first draft of my third novel Redwood Falls was 460 pages, and now it’s 365 (26% cut).  Of course it would be nice if I could just write it the “correct” length the first time around, but that’s just not how it pans out with my writing style and abilities.  And hey—all that extra writing, and hence editing, that I have to do because I have what Stephen King calls “diarrhea of the word processor”—it just means I get more practice.  And even though I’ve been writing novels for 11 years now, there’s always room for improvement!

 

Happy NaNoWriMo, and good luck for Week 2!

My NaNoWriMo Challenge

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November is National Novel-Writing Month, as many of you know, and many of you maybe don’t know. Every year, aspiring writers are challenged to complete an entire novel in just this one month (50,000 words is the low-end cutoff for a piece to be considered a novel; between 30k and 50k, it’s considered a novella. Fewer than 30,000 words is the accepted range for a short story. Most novels by writers who actually get paid and have agents and editors and other professional-type attributes tend to be between 80,000-120,000 words).  This year I will join in for the first time. But—me being me—I’m going to do it differently than most participants.

I’m currently working on my prison memoir, Rebel Hell: Doin’ Time For Barely a Crime. I started November already about 95,000 words in. Before I started that, I completed a 300,000+ word epic, ultra-militant animal liberation novel called The Liberators. So basically, I’ve been writing the equivalent of a novel a month for about the last 4-6 months, ha! I don’t need the NaNoWriMo Challenge to write a novel—I’ve already completed 6 of them, plus halves of 3 others! But I’m approaching a difficult stretch of my prison memoir, so I’ll play along and use NaNo as motivation to continue kicking ass on the memoir. My goal is to write 40,000-50,000 words on the book this month. I’ll post weekly updates with my progress, and perhaps some juicy excerpts.

I could work on what will be my next actual novel—Aran Kerplowski and the Polish Family Circus—and easily bang out a first draft, or at least 50,000 words of a first draft, this month. I have enough material in my head for it to complete a draft. But I think I need to write that particular novel at a slower, more deliberate pace. It will be of a higher quality that way, and like I said, I most certainly do not need NaNo and a feverish write-no-matter-what challenge to complete any novel. So instead, I’ll just challenge myself to continue my heavy, feverish, dedicated work on the prison memoir—which I think is an extremely funny, heart-wrenching, politically important book. I also think it may be the novel that helps me break out for a wider audience, since prison stories and shows and movies are so popular.

Happy Writing!!  Don’t let it drive you too crazy…

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