Ketchup

For those of you who don’t already know, November 1st marked the start of this year’s National Novel Writing Month, a fun if gimmicky event designed to motivate people to crank out an entire book in four weeks. Why? Beats the heck out of me. Most writers could make more money working at Burger King than banging away at our keyboards -- and you get free food, too! For years I considered this career change myself. It's only through insane persistence and good luck that I'm not asking you if you want a large fries with that.

The goal of National Novel Writing Month is 50K words, which is actually just half of a book unless you’re writing YA, but their catchy acronym is NaNoWriMo. If it was National Half-A-Novel Writing Month, they’d be left with NaHaNoWriMo. Or NaThirNoWriMo if you’re writing those door-stopper epic fantasy novels, in which case 50K is barely more than a third of your manuscript.

Anyway, it got me thinking, and I ran some numbers to see if I could compete -- and I can’t. Even when I have a week without interruptions, which is exceedingly rare, my personal best is 30K words in a month. Typically, I’m more like 20K, and my surprise for you today is that I actually prefer the 20K months.

One manuscript page is 250 words, btw. My daily goal is 6 pages minimum. I shoot for 8, 4 is considered mediocre, and I’m usually mad at myself if I don’t hit the 6 page mark, although if I only achieve 3 or 4 pages in a day but write a particularly evocative or technical scene, I’m glad.

Yes, it’s a fun, heady feeling to crank out 10 – 12 pages in a single day. Yeehaw! But I’ve found that what I write on those big days is often the same stuff that needs the most work later on, so it comes out the same. Either you blast it out fast and do more editing later, or you find a happy medium and get it mostly right the first time. My editor considers me a “clean” writer, which is flattering. She means that my manuscripts aren’t full of typos, unclear sentences, continuity lapses, or plot snafus. Naturally I hope to keep it that way, so my preference is a quick but steady pace, not sprinting.

20K words is a fifth of a book. After five months like that, you’ve got a complete novel, although I typically need at least another month to clean up the manuscript, add a few nuances here and there, and brightly polish the line-by-line writing.

So why aren’t I publishing two books a year? Well, this year I wrote two books, more or less -- 80K for Colony High, and 115K for Mind Plague, despite the distractions. I have family, and a house and a yard, and the business part of writing seems to be encroaching more and more on my time; contracts; interviews; research; conventions; preparing for panels and classes at conventions; fan mail; outlining future books; etc.

I know, I know -- these are EXCELLENT problems to have!!! I’m not complaining. But for me, at least, 50K a month just ain't realistic.

Labels: Mind Plague, National Novel Writing Month, the writing life