Challenge (to myself) accepted

I have taken on the challenge of NaNoWriMo again this year. For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is shorthand for National Novel Writing Month. We are so busy writing that we don't have time to say the whole thing. And it is a fun, nonsensical word to say over and over.

As the website describes it:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000 word, (approximately 175 page) novel by 11:59:59, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time last year. Like so many, I have wanted to be a writer for much of my life, but never took the plunge beyond school papers and four years of blogging. A close friend signed up last year and encouraged me to do the same. And I am better for it.

It was a struggle as detailed in previous posts, but at around noon on November 30, 2010, I had 50,213 words toward a novel that would eventually be titled, "Share the Road". After more writing, and a few rounds of editing and revision, I am planning on self-publishing it by the end of the year.

Without the time crunch of the self-inflicted deadline, made to a website I had never heard of before, I may never have written anything of length. I am thankful for NaNoWriMo and all the tips and encouragement of the community. And to my friend that gave me the shove I needed.

I am a procrastinator. I need a deadline. 50,000 words in 30 days forces me to sit down in front of the computer, whether I am feeling creative or not. I am not as disciplined the rest of the year, but the month of frantic writing and the resulting novel was an exciting experience. As difficult as it is, I have enjoyed the rewrites, and I am proud to have written a novel. If it never happened again, I would have something to point to. And that would be great.

But I want it to happen again. To see if I can capture it again. To see if it was more than a fluke. To keep writing as a part of my life.

A new year, a new novel. I would love to keep that rhythm going for the rest of my life. And NaNoWriMo gives me the kick in the butt to sit my butt down and write.

It starts again tomorrow.

A false front

I was close to seeing my book in print. It was finished, but still really rough. It wasn't important to have the cover be perfect at this point. In fact, it didn't need a cover at all, but I was interested to see what a finished book from CreateSpace would look like. And just like the formatting adventure, it was something new to learn.

As I mentioned before, CreateSpace offers professional help to produce a good looking novel. But in the spirit of the self-publisher who wants to go it on his own, there is also a cover creator program on the website. There were several themes to choose from, each with a different color scheme and with varying picture sizes. The program is pretty straight forward, and you could probably whip out a cover in a half hour or less.

But I knew I would eventually want something different, so I decided to experiment. But I didn't have any photo editing experience outside of the very basic cropping. More things to learn.

Still not wanting to spend any money, I went searching the web for a free program. From what I found, it appeared that the program gimp (GNU image manipulation program) was one of the best. I downloaded the program, as well as a very helpful manual produced by one of the discussion board regulars, and set about trying to learn to make a cover.

Like the movie making software I have used in the past, the gimp program could do far more things than I would ever need. As is true of many non-entry level programs, it was not incredibly intuitive to use, but the manual helped tremendously. But just like the formatting of the Word doc, there were still hair-pulling moments where I didn't understand why things weren't working.

I was still in the messing around stage of things, but I wanted the cover to look as nice as possible. There were several old photos that I thought I could use, but they were taken with an old camera and the resolution was not good enough to fit without blowing them up. I saw a cover of a book at my girlfriend's house that reminded me of a photo I had taken at the Grand Canyon. It had nothing to do with what the book was about, but it was a nice shot and I thought the color scheme worked.

This is what the test run of the book ended up looking like:

I sent everything off to CreateSpace and I had a novel proof in my hand in less than a week. I knew it wasn't really a novel, but is sure looked like one. It was a great feeling.

I noticed a couple of formatting errors (my mistakes), made some quick changes and ordered a couple more copies. Now it was time to pass them out to the first people who would read them. Yikes.

Getting it in print

After a couple of rounds of editing, it still wasn't near ready for prime time, but it felt like there was enough there worth working on. But of course how I felt about it would change day to day, paragraph to paragraph. I needed to get the book out of my hands and get someone else's opinion. I could have just printed it out, but I had the opportunity for something a little nicer.

NaNoWriMo is a non-profit organization, and they depend on the support of both users and corporate sponsors. Some of the sponsors provide discount codes to participants, and others offer prizes for those who make it to the 50,000 word goal.

One of those prizes was a free paperback proof from CreateSpace, a print on demand company owned by Amazon.com. The coupon for a free proof expired sometime in June, and I didn't want it to go to waste. But of course I couldn't just send them a Word file and expect it to turn out looking like a book.

Fortunately, they provide lots of help for the first time novelist. They offer professional services that you can buy piece-meal, as well as some help for the do-it-your-selfer. Not only are there guidelines and FAQs on the site, but there is also an active discussion board where people that have been through it all can pass on their wisdom.

The first step was to get the Word doc formatted to work as a paperback. CreateSpace has Word files on the site that you can use as a template, and they come in various sizes for your desired book size. This made things much easier than starting from scratch, but even so, there were many hair pulling moments trying to get the page numbers and blank pages to work. I was using features I hadn't used before, and trying to learn how they worked by trial and error.

After much cutting and pasting, references to the help files, and heavy use of the undo key, it was starting to look like a book without a binding. Now I just needed a cover.

Back up

I write regularly in coffee shops and libraries. I am more easily distracted at home, so I am constantly carrying my netbook around. I am paranoid about losing my novel through either theft of my netbook, or from a computer crash that I can't recover from. I don't want to imagine losing my first novel. I don't know if I would have the strength to write it again.

I have been using the online service DropBox. Dropbox is essentially an online drive where you can store and backup your information. Not only is the information backed up, but you can you access files from any computer or Smartphone. When you sign up for the (free) service, you place a folder on any device you use regularly. When a file is saved to the local folder, a copy is stored online, and the folders on your other devices are updated as well. You can also access the folder on any random computer by going to their website and signing in with your password.

When I was writing the first draft of Share the Road, I backed it up after each session. And either through paranoia, or to create a road map of how far I got each day, I sent a separate file each day leaving all the previous ones intact. There are 30 versions of the first draft, one for each day I wrote. I did the same thing for each of the edits, so there are more than a hundred files, each with a slightly different version of the book.

I doubt I will ever go back and pour over each version to see what each contains, but it is sort of interesting to look back on the file dates to see how long I took on each round of editing. I probably won't even open more than a few of the files at any time, but it is nice to know they are there, backed up on another server in case my computer fails.

And of course, most everything is backed up on another external drive in case the cloud fails me. You can never be too careful.

Painting a better picture

I enjoyed the first read-through. I found good bits and pieces that I had forgotten about. I could see the occasional a-ha moments that happened as I wrote my way into the story. I saw again how random things I put down early in the story popped up again later. And after reading it through, I finally had a title I liked. It was really rough, but it only made me want to make it better.

And it needed a lot of work. There was rambling, repetition, and lots of typos. Though it is not a story where lots of things are happening (think Cast Away), it was in desperate need of fleshing out. I had pictured the scenes in my minds eye, but I had not brought that clarity to the page.

During the first round of editing, I primarily focused on bumping up the descriptive parts, painting a better picture of the world my character was passing through. Since this was not a plot driven book, I needed to be able to pull the reader into the world if it would have any chance of getting them to keep turning pages. I would work on polishing the story on the second pass-through.

This approach to editing is the reverse of most recommended methods. Why bother fleshing out the scenes in a story if you aren't even sure if they are going to remain in the book. But for some reason this is what appealed to me. I needed to be pulled into the world as well, to find reasons to be there, to find details I previously missed.

And I found that I enjoyed editing.

I was surprised by a couple of things. Editing was as slow or slower than putting down the first draft. As hard as I struggled getting the story down on the page, I couldn't imagine going any slower. But in a way editing was more difficult. I wasn't pouring over every word, but the focus was definitely finer. Just as I was trying to notice more details in the imagined scenery, individual words and sentences clamored for attention.

But I found that I enjoyed the tweaking. It still felt like I was discovery writing even though I knew the story already. By taking a closer look at the scenery passing by, I found more inspiration, and so did the main character. The story still wasn't worth showing to anyone else just yet, but it felt like I was headed in the right direction.

First read

My first novel, written in a rush in just over a month. There was pride, there was elation, there was computer screen eye fatigue...now I had to read the thing.

As I mentioned previously, during the month of November I did not go back and read what I had written. One of the many lessons from On Writing was to shelter away your first draft and show no one the work in progress. It is just too rough, and you are already filled with enough self-doubt that you don't need anyone else reinforcing that feeling. You just need to lock yourself away until it is all done.

I included myself in that recommendation. I did not read back any further than a few paragraphs to pick up where I left off. I had to keep my head down and keep writing, and it was no time to edit or obsess. But now it was done. The time for revision was here.

I had intended to wait a month before reading it for the first time, but I was home for Christmas and had time at my disposal. And of course I was just excited to see what I had written. I held out until December 22nd.

I went to a copy store and printed it out on 8.5 x 11 paper. I bought a new binder and a couple of highlighter pens. I went to a Starbucks, bought a strong cup of coffee, and braced myself for what I would find. Of course I was excited to read it for the first time, but I knew I would find things that made me cringe.

I started reading it and marking up the page. I spent a long time of the first chapter, trying to tweak and rewrite sentences to paint a better picture. I don't remember how far I got before realizing that it wasn't working. I was getting too bogged down, obsessing over phrases and punctuation. I wasn't reading the story.

I ended up setting the notebook aside. I found a program online that would convert my Word file to a mobile format, and downloaded the book to my Kindle. There are ways to make notes on the Kindle, but it is more cumbersome than with pen and paper. Reading it as an ebook made it easier to just read. Of course I was making mental notes along the way, but the first time through, I just read.

Turning point

I was over two thirds of the way through the month, but not as far along on the word count. I had been doing a pretty good job at clawing my way back toward that purple line over the past five days, but as my text on the 22nd implied, I was hitting another stall point where doubt and terrible writing were creeping in.

I wrote nothing on the 24th, and very little on the 25th. I was bumping up against the turning point in the novel. Unfortunately, I didn't exactly know what that turning point was going to be. I was stalling, not sure where to go. Five days until the deadline, 16,500 words to go.

The character in my book was riding his bike down the west coast. He was physically moving down the road as the story unfolded, and he had reached a nice stopping point. Something needed to happen. I was running out of time and real estate. So I plunged ahead.

Over the next few days, I wrote furiously. The combination of the approaching deadline and my own discovery about where the story was leading spurred me on. The story started to move, and the words came more easily. It certainly did not "write itself" as I have heard some people describe it, but in a way I was more detached and excited to see how it would turn out.

Over the final five days, I wrote those 16,500 words, plus a few more. At noon on November 30th, 2010, I had 50,213 words toward my first novel. I had made it. Through all the stalling and all the days where I didn't write, I had crossed the finish line with twelve hours to spare.

The good news/bad news? I'm wasn't done. When I was stalled at 33,000 words, I didn't think I had enough left to say to make it to the 50,000 word mark. But the turning point ended up being longer than expected, so I have a few more chapters to go until I reach "The End".

I took a much needed break for a day or two, but was back at it after a couple of days. On December 12th, I had 9,000 more words and the first draft of my first novel.

My first novel. Hard to believe.

But the work and fun were just beginning.