16 Days into a Dry November, 30,000 Words into NaNoWriMo

I had my last drink of alcohol on October 30th before attempting a dry November and embarking on my second effort two years in a row at writing 50,000 words of fiction for National Novel Writing Month. As of this morning, exactly one half of the way through the month, I reached 30,000 words. I am making better than average progress, I think, as I am 5,000 words ahead of the goal. I’d like to say that I’ll be able to keep that up. The universe knows at least that I am committed to the task. What I remember most about last year’s effort was that after the half way mark, after a kind of creative, inspirational honeymoon, things started to get significantly harder. One begins to run out of steam. One worries about running out of words and out of places to take those words.

A friend of mine on Facebook, an alumni of the writing program I graduated from, and a writing teacher who coaches a group of students through NaNoWriMo every year, gave me this advice today as I announced my progress. He told me now would be a good time to carve out some space to kind of outline the places and scenes where I think my novel needs to go. Armed with an outline, he told me, my last 20,000 words will come more easily, having a kind of road map to follow. My friend seems to be assuming that up to this point in the process, I have been flying blind–or driving without any type of map whatsoever, as is my wont, actually, and what he may remember me saying about my process last year. It’s true. I don’t outline; I don’t map. Last year I had one guiding star–and that was roughly the plot line of Shakespeare’s Hamlet–but that novel was not a mere retelling of the play; it was a story of a puppeteer performing a version of Hamlet while simultaneously going through his very own family crisis. Without any kind of outline or plot map, only knowing that these two things had to somehow form a kind of unholy tapestry, I would sit down (or stand up) every day and I would just fly by the seat of my pants. I find myself doing a very similar thing this year. I started only with a character’s name and a few vignettes about him from a third person point of view. I didn’t know what he did for a living, I didn’t know what the central conflict might be, I had no thematic leanings, but I began writing nevertheless, hoping to just kind of write my way into knowledge about those things. Lo and behold, it worked. I now know, kind of, the answers to those big questions. However, I still worry about the last 20,000 words.

I think I would like to take my friend’s advice and try to map out the plot from here–but it might be difficult. The novel I am working on is an unconventional beast. It doesn’t really have, or isn’t really dependent upon, a through plot line. Well, you may ask, what kind of novel is that, Michael Jarmer Writer Guy?! Well, it is the kind of novel I am interested in now, one that blurs the lines between genres, one that works through character and language, image and idea rather than the deliberate sequencing of events for dramatic effect–which has struck me, for the better part of a decade now, as a flimsy kind of conceit. Reality Hunger, by David Shields, I think, has kind of ruined me as a fiction writer. I’m doing many of the things that students taking an Intro to Fiction Writing class would be told expressly NOT to do. A map or an outline may not work–UNLESS–it is a map or an outline that eschews things like events, scenes, the trappings of your typical and conventional plot. I’m not suggesting that I am breaking any new ground. A thousand examples of writers doing this kind of thing come before me and I am standing on their shoulders. But a map, I find, a map of some kind, might still be helpful to me for my last 20,000 words. I think I will stop now, and use the rest of the writing time I have today to become a cartographer of sorts. I’ll set out to write myself some directions toward uncharted territory.