Sailing Venus: NaNoWriMo post-mortem

So, this grand experiment I participated in this year, this NaNoWriMo, has come and gone. After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that I suck at it.

With November coming to a close a full week ago, my total word count came in at just a shade above 4,000 words. That's a decent length for a short story, but far short of the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words (which is itself somewhat short of novel length, traditionally 60,000 words or more). November simply wasn't a good month for me. Apart from the Thanksgiving holiday and associated travel, I had all manner of challenges present themselves to me this month. I had some medical issues to take care of, there was the funeral for a relative I got to be pall bearer for, family issues and a host of other little things that added up to exhaustion--both emotional and physical. Some nights it was all I could do to crawl into bed at 10 p.m., which is traditionally when my writing time begins. Couple that with the fact that I am by no means a fast writer, and this endeavor was clearly doomed from the start.

I never intended to write 50,000 words. I think I've written 2,500-plus words in one day exactly once in my life. My goal was the still-ambitious (for me) 30,000 word mark, which would've demanded an average of 1,000 words a day. That's doable, but would demand more hours in a day than I can normally spare. I ended up averaging a modest 500 words a day. Divide my 4,000-word total by that rate and you'll see the ugly truth: out of 30 days in November, I actually wrote productively on just eight of them.

The good news is that I intended NaNoWriMo to simply kickstart Sailing Venus, and this is has. I completed the first chapter and part of the second. I've outlined the entire novel, something I've never done before, and I continue to work on it. Hopefully, without any major headwinds like I experienced in November, I can have the first draft wrapped up sometime this summer. I wouldn't complain about that at all. And now, just to show that I am doing real, for-true writing on this story, I offer the following worldbuilding snippet:

The disembarking station curved around the berth, an unremarkable seamed white wall and slate gray carpet. Ages before, several mobile columns of ivy had been positioned at aesthetic intervals to break up the functional monotony of the room. Through neglect, all the ivy had died, leaving the bare, scalloped columns, now oddly threatening without vegetation to soften their hard edges.

To the left of the rightmost column, the large airlock hatch scissored open.

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Sailing Venus: The creative process

I believe it is safe to say, by any objective measure, that I stink at this whole NaNoWriMo concept. According to the online word cruncher, I've written just a shade over 2,600 words. By my standard manuscript page counting method, I've topped out at almost 3,200 words. By any metric, that's anemic production for a write-a-thon challenge where the goal is 50,000 words in a single month.

Still, I have reached a few milestones. That 2,600 words represents a completed first chapter. And I've already introduced revisions to my story outline as well as made a handful of interesting discovers--things that just popped up in the course of writing--that should serve me well farther down the line.

I'm nowhere near the 1K daily average I'd hoped for, but progress is progress. Not awful, considering I'm still in the worldbuilding/setup phase without strong plot forces kicking in yet to drive the narrative.

I'm writing Sailing Venus differently than I've written any other fiction. Because I had such an overwhelming amount of information, the Chicken Ranch book forced me to outline it out of necessity. I don't enjoy outlining, but found it useful for that non-fiction project, even though I found myself revising the outline repeatedly. So, I committed to outlining. In fact, I went a step further--I sketched out the narrative structure of Sailing Venus using Blake Snyder's beat sheet (adapted for novel-length work as opposed to screenplays), with additional influences from Dan Decker's Anatomy of a Screenplay. Apart from the "what happens when" framework the basic outline gives, these other approaches help clarify specific character arcs and thematic elements. Using their nomenclature, I've wrapped up the "opening image" with Chapter 1 and am moving into the "theme stated" phase with Chapter 2. There's overlap, of course--these ideas have fuzzy edges rather than sharp boundaries--but my story concept is hewing pretty closely to the model, much to my surprise and delight.

"Opening image," equates to a lot of worldbuilding in a very short amount of time, conveying the idea of a dangerous, expansive world and a complex method of transport in this environment (Spoiler alert! The events in Sailing Venus do, in fact, take place on Venus). I feel I have to establish how technically challenging it is to successfully pilot the futuristic sailplane Windsprint immediately, so that later on, when the story intensifies, readers already have this understanding hardwired into their perceptions. I won't need to waste time or momentum re-hashing these details. This is a deliberate worldbuilding and narrative structure choice decided upon by your humble author. Granted, that's a relatively straightforward application of strategy, but I hope to impart some behind-the-scenes appreciation of the writing process with these mini-essays. My writing process, at least.

"Theme stated," for me, is entirely about character development. Anatomy of a Screenplay defines this section as establishing character structure, drive structure and the objective opponent. In this, Erica's immediate objective opponent is her father, as they have a contentious relationship and can't quite seem to find any common ground despite good faith effort on both their parts. This is the core of the character arc as well as a recurrent theme throughout the book. It provides subtext to every scene--he father is a looming presence even when he's not around. So, classic YA territory here.

But this is a science fiction adventure, inspired by the great Winston juveniles. The real antagonist is Venus itself. This breaks hard from the directives found in Anatomy of a Screenplay, which insists on a character antagonist. I found myself acutely conscious of this conflict as I read taht book, but that work is very clear that its focus is wholly on the Hollywood story model, so it isn't 100 percent applicable to my story needs. But I did find elements I could readily apply to my novel, despite not fitting the norm. If Man vs. Nature was good enough for Jack London, then it (in this case, Girl vs. Planet) is good enough for me. Venus is quite sincerely out to kill every human who approaches it, and is relentless in its determination. In this way, Venus wholly fills the role of antagonist, even though the planet lacks any motivation or intent. Venus simply is, and literally has the resources of an entire world to throw at our protagonist. The fact that it is utterly indifferent to the Erica's fate, I believe, makes the scenario all the more chilling.

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Sailing Venus: And we're off

Here we are, five days into this NaNoWriMo thing, and one thing is becoming very, very clear: This novel writing stuff is hard! Now I remember why I used to just write short stories--they're not any easier, mind you, but you get to the end of an 8,000-word novelette a heck of a lot quicker than a 90,000-word novel (even tho NaNoWriMo only requires 50,000 words, we all know better). Despite having outlined approximately half of Sailing Venus, this first chapter has progressed slowly. Very slowly. Pulling teeth slowly. After four days--only two of which I've managed any actual writing--I've put a grand total of 1,000 words on paper. That's four page. In two days. Ugh.

A big part of the problem is that I'm still getting to know my characters. I have a vague notion of their personalities in broad strokes, but other than certain specific topics, I don't really know how they'd respond to general situations, how they'd talk about various things. Their speech patterns and phrasings are still a mystery in a broad sense. Add on top of that a profoundly hostile environment and my own vague notions of how the physics would work in these situations, and I've got a situation where I spend most of my time pondering plausible dialogue when I'm not flipping through my notes and reference books for clarifications.

"Now hold on," you might be saying about now. "NaNoWriMo isn't about checking notes or getting dialogue right--it's about vomiting copious volumes of words onto the page at a breakneck pace!" Well, that may be true for most folk, but nobody's ever going to mistake me for Robert Silverberg in terms of output. A certain degree of self-editing and pre-editing is inherent in my writing process. Leaving something obviously wrong in my manuscript uncorrected is a burr under my saddle, a distraction, an irritant that undermines subsequent writings. So, I write as I do, hoping the cumulative total at some point equals a book worth reading. Here's a small sample of what I've produced thus far, just so you can appreciate the depths of my struggle:

A shrill bleating interrupted her.

"That was a short 20 kilometers," Sigfried said, checking his harness.

"Nanny keeps me on a short leash." Erica sat up, tightening her harness. She gripped the yoke, thumbing the control surface of the central column. The bleating intensified. "Not today, autopilot. Altitude, 56,280 meters. Wind speed, 71 meters per second. You ready, Sigfried?"

"I hate this part."

Erica grinned. "I love it."

Windsprint pivoted under Erica’s control. The long wings flattened, contracted, compressing the hydrogen gas to negative buoyancy. The keel telescoped in, narrowing to a sliver. The sail plane dove into the teeth of the gale.

No, it doesn't exactly sparkle beautifully in the sunlight, but then again, what does? Hopefully, once I get through Chapter 1 and into the meat of the set-up, the words will flow a little easier than they do in these introductory scenes. At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

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So, NaNoWriMo is a thing...

I've been aware of the even of National Novel-Writing Month for a while now. It's always struck me as somewhat amusing, but I've never participated. Until now. It's with equal measures of apprehension and trepidation (yeah, I know) that I bit the bullet and created myself an account there. My username is jblaschke for those of you out there interested in such things.

In the past, I've not participated in NaNoWriMo for several reasons: 1) I usually had another project in the works and 2) I'm not a fast writer. Seriously. No way I could write a novel in a month, so why bother? I had a gut feeling that the emphasis of quantity over quality was missing the point somehow. I still do, to a certain extent. But there are some very specific reasons why I'm choosing to throw my hat into the ring this time around.

First and foremost is this post. Check out the date: 2005. I've been researching this book, in some form or another, for the better part of a decade. And it's no closer to being written now than it was back then. That is utterly and completely unacceptable. The procrastination ends now.

The next reasons are my children: Monkey Girl prods me every so often, as does Fairy Girl, reminding me that I've long promised to write something for them to read and enjoy... preferably before she graduates high school. And she's a freshman this year. She's also done NaNoWriMo these past two years, and has unsubtly hinted that I should join up and compete with her for daily wordcounts.

Finally, this baptism of fire that NaNoWriMo offers will serve as a sharp break from the whole Chicken Ranch book. I finished that book more than a year ago, but revisions, new interviews, agent hunting and the like have conspired to keep me mired in the project and the mindset that goes with it. Whilst writing fiction and non-fiction do indeed use the same set of writing tools an author develops over the course of a career, they use entirely different sets of writing muscles, if that makes any sense. My fiction muscles have atrophied a great deal. I've tried to limber them up by working on a couple of incomplete short stories, and while that helped some, more short fiction isn't going to jump-start my career at this point. To a great extent, short fiction has become an avoidance strategy keeping me from the (intimidating) commitment novels demand.

So, in that context, I'm using NaNoWriMo as leverage to jump-start Sailing Venus. I have no intent to produce 50,000 words by the end of the month. I don't think that's a remotely attainable goal for me. But I am setting myself a goal of 30,000 words. That's right at four pages a day--some days I'll write more, others, none at all (I'm cognizant of the demands on my life). Producing 30,000 words is reasonable, but by no means easy. Or a given. Even getting close to that mark will put me about a third of the way through the novel, which is a win any way you look at it.

I'll be sharing more thoughts about this process, which will be substantially different from any other writing project I've undertaken in the past. Stay tuned.

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