I just completed my NaNoWriMo project for 2023. I wrote three stories for The Last Question world in thirty days, totaling 30,984 words. You can find the drafts on the NaNoWriMo page of this blog, with the caveat that they are indeed drafts. Let’s get into how this all went.
Planned Service Interruptions
I tempered my expectations for this month based on experience. In 2021 I had high hopes that fell short. I wrote three stories then, totaling around 30,000 words. Learning from that attempt, I considered I’d be traveling for work for five days near the start of November, and there was a holiday weekend. So, I took the 2021 result and opted to replicate it as my goal.
This was a good move.
I appreciated having a nice round number of 1,000 words per day, even though falling behind a week in meant I had to readjust my pace.
That was roughly planned for though, so I never felt overwhelmed by needing to catch up. And as I crept closer to reaching parity, it felt like a day was coming where I would suddenly jump back into position. You can see that happened on November 24, when I wrote 2,200 words and ended above the original goal for that day.
Knowing what I was getting myself into helped me prepare both mentally and socially. Erin knew I was working on this, and I managed to be forward enough to share the effort with a few friends so I could, without needing to explain more, say that I had some writing to do in the evening. It turns out friends like to be supportive.
Life Hacks
I was not always efficient with my writing. I would get distracted on my phone, go for walks, or sit and stare at the document for dozens of minutes and get a single sentence of dialogue out. There was an element of last minute panic to my routine: I’d wager the majority of my words were written after 8:30 PM when I was trying to reach my daily allotment before it got too late.
A huge discovery was a concentrated version of what I felt when I discussed typing on a mechanical keyboard: I began listening to pink noise while wearing headphones. It completely eliminated atmospheric noise from the TV, and even effectively blocked music at coffee shops. But unlike noise-cancelling headphones, it didn’t leave me with a sense of eerie silence that would suddenly snap me out of focus. It has a leveling effect on my brain that I found useful for the sake of drafting. I’m going to be using it moving forward when I need to focus at work because it appears to be tremendously helpful.
I also enjoyed switching devices and locations based on my mood. The first half of this month I spent with my iPad. It’s meant to be my creation device, which is why I agonize so much over my writing setup on it. It has a natural focus to it. I used Stage Manager on the iPad and connected it to an external monitor, although that didn’t last long.1I can see how it could be helpful if I was trying to bounce between several apps, but not having extra peripherals for my iPad at my desk meant the effort wasn’t worth it. So I pivoted to how I normally write, with the iPad in my lap or on my desk, hunched over slightly. I went out on weekend mornings to little tables or benches in our neighborhood, enjoying the portability and simplicity of my setup.
Eventually I found myself spending more time writing on my MacBook, in both laptop and desktop modes. At my desk I could sit or stand, use my ergonomic keyboard, and have a single window centered on a large screen that still had extra space on it. I can’t precisely explain why this is the case, but I find the window existing on top of an empty desktop more calming and focusing than a full-screen iPad app. In addition, for a few days I developed some small pain in just my left pinky that was made worse when typing on the iPad. Using a larger keyboard, particularly my desktop ergonomic one, reduced the aching.
Something to Say
While I can’t directly compare how I felt in 2021 or 2019 to right now, I am proud of the work I did this month. In 2019 I was simply putting down words with the goal of hitting the count as fast as possible. Whatever I wrote was largely unreadable and I have no desire to revisit any of it.
The stories in 2021 had an intent behind them, but they were exploratory in the worst possible way. I had not thought carefully about the world of The Last Question prior to beginning NaNoWriMo that year, and I believe the quality of the stories suffered. They were jumbled and inconsistent. I also have a memory of not knowing where I was going with the plots, or even the mood I wanted to establish. They are more coherent than my 2019 effort, but still raw.
I’ve greatly benefited from having over a dozen hours of playtime in The Last Question world, in addition to several hours of thinking about the kinds of stories I want to have available. Reading The Expanse series was also formative, because I adore the style in those books. I didn’t want to copy them, but it gave me something recent to hook onto. When I sat down to begin writing this month, I felt I had better ideas for plots, more flexibility to work within the world in a consistent manner, and I felt connected to the characters I created in a way I haven’t before while writing. As each story progressed, I could begin to grasp where the characters were moving on their own, and the pieces of their story I wanted to show the audience. I also found myself having actual thoughts to share that I could place inside the story, rather than just relating events like I would when recapping my day.
A Change in Approach
This month I took risks in my writing that blog posts don’t ask of me. I explored three different styles of stories, and enjoyed the different looks. I stretched myself without pushing too hard. It felt like a mature reconnection to the version of myself from fifth to seventh grade when all I wanted to do was write anything in any form, because it was plain fun. When it comes down to it, I had fun this month.
Solar was the most straightforward, and since I wrote it first, that makes sense. It jumped timelines, but stayed focused on a single character and had a linear narrative we were following. It was an exploration of someone with strong technical skills who fell into an odd niche and found themselves in a new world without fully realizing it. I like that for this character type: smart and naive.
Naught was not intended to be a mystery at first, at least not one that had a detective. I had intended for Seton to be the main character who keeps having flirtations with death, and he slowly figures out how he accidentally got himself wrapped up in the local cartel. It would be a story of a bumbling janitor ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But the week prior, when I was flying to Orlando, I read All Souls Lost by Dan Moren. It’s a very silly yet compelling detective story with a gruff, sarcastic main character. Every so often I want to write something I find funny, so I created Mason Omer as our main character and had him be our grizzled veteran Naught character. Since the goal of these stories is to give examples of the complexities that can surround a character type from the game while keeping them grounded in their core shtick, it seemed like it could still work. The mystery’s resolution was a mystery to me until I found myself facing down the final 1,000 words and needed to figure out how it all ended. I went back through the story and updated a few details to make it consistent at a surface level, but I’m looking forward to reading this one back and seeing if any clues are even there, or if it’s so obvious as to be boring. I’ve never written a mystery, so I bet I didn’t quite nail the landing.
Bound was the most impactful story to me. I hope it comes off in some of the passages, but it was meant to reflect some of the writing I’ve found effective and affective over the years. It deals with relationship issues I experienced as a teenager, and dynamics I’ve observed in others over the years. I wanted to strike a balance of the Bound character type being tethered to Earth in some ways, but not beholden to it. I liked having parallel scenes of Lily and Poppy facing antisymmetric experiences at times, and some of the individual scenes I poured a lot of heart into. I’m sure parts of it need a tremendous amount of work, but I found this one technically easy to write, though emotionally difficult in a few places.
What Next?
My goal is to give this all a break for at least a month, and then start editing the stories from 2021. I don’t want to rush the process. I have a copy of the book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers that I want to read and act on. In addition to editing these stories one-by-one, I still have a list of twelve “fables” or “tales” I’d like to write. These will be shorter, likely in the 1,000 – 2,000 word range, but the final goal is a volume containing six character stories, and twelve of these “world-building” stories.
Outside of The Last Question, I’m not sure. This is a project I’m invested in and enjoy, so it’s possible that next year for NaNoWriMo I find something related to tackle. One thing this month has taught me is that prose continues to be a powerful outlet for me, and I discount that. I’d like to expand my writing horizons yet again and share a wider variety of writing on my blog. I’m incredibly pleased with how NaNoWriMo went this year though, and it makes me happy I’ve stuck with my passion for writing all this time.
- 1I can see how it could be helpful if I was trying to bounce between several apps, but not having extra peripherals for my iPad at my desk meant the effort wasn’t worth it.