No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days (9 page)

MASSIVE SNACKS

Speaking of veggies.... When you’re writing, you’ll eat just about anything that lingers near your keyboard for more than thirty seconds, which makes this an excellent time to get caught up on all those boring vitamin-and mineral-laden foods you spend the rest of the year avoiding. Go crazy in the produce aisle of your favorite grocer, and buy a ton of carrots, celery sticks, broccoli, green peppers, and anything else that catches your eye. Then take them home, chop ‘em up, and leave them in a bowl of water in the fridge. They’ll keep longer that way, and they’ll also be crisp and cool when you’re ready to graze.

A writer cannot live by celery sticks alone, however. As you wrestle with your novel, you’ll need the explosive energy bursts that only a steady diet of manufactured sugar can provide. Stockpile chocolate in all its mouth-watering forms.

The only cautionary question you should ask yourself is, “Can I shove these things into my mouth and then type without leaving residue all over the computer?” Some snacks are more keyboard friendly than others.

Once you’ve accumulated your weight in junk food, you should dispense it according to the following careful criteria: Did you just finish a paragraph? Have a treat.

DRINKS

Beverage scientists have discovered that dehydration is one of the main factors in making a person feel tired. As it’s all but impossible to work on your novel while you’re collapsed over your keyboard asleep, you should constantly pump your body full of fluids while working. Water, however boring, is a must. But having lots of adventuresome drinks on hand also makes the novel-writing process a little more exciting, with each trip to the refrigerator mirroring your own literary voyage of discovery. So go wild at the grocery store when you stock up, getting both old favorites and some new oddities. Mango-choco-guava nectar? Sure! Pomegranate-beet soda? You bet!

And don’t forget to load up on the warm drinks as well. Coffee, tea, and hot chocolate are soothing balms for frazzled synapses. In addition to serving as excellent caffeine conduits, their warmth is Physically reassuring, and their slow-sipping properties make them the perfect noveling pause. It also feels wonderfully picturesque and romantic to have a steaming beverage near your computer while you’re working, especially if someone is going to be dropping by to see how the writing is going.

CHAPTER 4

CRUISING FOR CHARACTERS, PANNING FOR PLOTS, AND THE FIRST EXCITING

GLIMPSES OF THE BOOK WITHIN

After months of preparation, Jennifer McCreedy had an absolutely clear vision of how her intricate fantasy novel would unfurl.

“I churned out character biographies, world maps, and language keys,” says the twenty-year-old onetime NaNoWriMo winner from Detroit. “I had developing cultures, societies, religions, hierarchical class structures—even regional clothing, genetic quirks, weapons, and customs.”

When the month began, Jennifer dove in with all of her notes at her side—and promptly stopped writing.

“I did so much developmental work on the novel that when it came time to actually write it, I was horrified at what I was coming up with. I’d committed too much to making a complete world for my novel just to watch it crumble under the needs of a November 30th deadline. So I set it aside for future work and started completely anew.”

Jennifer’s experience echoes the dismay of thousands of National Novel Writing Month participants who have brought months or years of novel ideas to the writing table and ended up finding them to be more of a hindrance than a help in getting something written.

It may be counterintuitive, but when it comes to novel writing, more preparation does not necessarily produce a better book. In fact, too much preparation has a way of stopping novel writing altogether. As reassuring as it is to embark on your writing journey with a mule-team’s worth of character traits, backstories, plot twists, metaphors, and motifs, it’s also a 100 percent viable strategy to walk into the wilds of your novel with nothing but a bottle of water and a change of underwear. That said, some amount of planning and predeparture decision-making can be incredibly helpful. And few things in life rival the brainstormy fun of sitting in a coffeeshop with your notebook and pen contemplating the delicious inventory of ideas, people, places, and expressions that might work well in your book. Even if you’re going to improvise your plot as you write, it will help in the long run if you ruminate a little on what kinds of things you’d like to write about. And the planners out there should feel free to completely bury their homes and apartments in plot notes, character lists, story outlines, city maps, costume drawings, evocative photos, and encouraging quotes. All with one catch: You only get one week, maximum, to research your book before you start writing it.

--------------------RESEARCH MADE PAINLESS: THE FIVE-CLICK GOOGLE

In doing research for your book, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormous amount of things you don’t know about your subject. To make sure I don’t end up in a whimpering, panicked ball underneath my computer, I’ve come up with a novel-research technique I call the Five-Click Google. Say, for instance, I want to set my upcoming novel in Singapore, and base it around the life of the bartender who invented the Singapore Sling cocktail. I’m not sure why this seems like a good idea, but my heart’s set on it.

Do I know anything about Singapore? No. Have I ever consumed a Singapore Sling? Nope. Great. This is where the Five-Click Google comes in. I bring up the search engine on Google.com and type “Singapore sling,” “history,” and “Singapore” and hit enter. Now the entirety of my research is to be accomplished in five of the 1,023,009 hits Google has found that match my query. Thanks to the über-wired nature of the Internet, those five clicks are actually surprisingly bountiful. In less than twenty minutes, I know that the drink was invented in the 1920s by a bartender named Ngiam Ton Boon at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, and that the drink is a cherry brandy cocktail that sells for an extortionate seventeen dollars. I also learn that the Raffles Hotel was a hot spot for writers in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and that Somerset Maugham haunted the grounds for years, penning odes to the Orient.

A famous writer. An infamous drink. And a coming war that would change their destinies forever. I can hear the voice-over for the movie version of my book already. Thanks, Google!

-------------------THE HAPPY SIDE EFFECTS OF LIMITED PLANNING

I know one week seems like a very short amount of time for laying out an entire novel, but trust me: It’s perfect. Seven days gives you enough time to get some good ideas on paper, but it prevents the deadly onset of overplanning, which is dangerous for three reasons:

-1) If you give yourself too much time to plan, you might end up stumbling across a brilliant concept for your novel. And the last thing you want heading into your noveling month is a brilliant concept. Every year during National Novel Writing Month, I get emails from people jubilantly informing me that they’re dropping out of the contest because they’ve found a story they love, and they want to work on it slowly enough to do it justice.

When I check in with these people six months later, they’ve inevitably stopped working on the book entirely. Why? Because they’ve become afraid of ruining their book by actually sitting down and writing it.

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise. Once you stumble across a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime idea for a book, it’s hard to treat that story with the irreverent disregard needed to transform it from a great idea into a workable rough draft. When you just give yourself one week to flesh out your concept, you won’t have time to feel overly protective of your ideas. And you will therefore stand a much better chance of bringing them to life.

-2) Past a certain point, novel planning just becomes another excuse to put off novel writing. You will never feel sufficiently ready to jump into your novel, and the more time you spend planning and researching, the more likely you’ll feel pressure to pull off a masterwork that justifies all your prewriting work. Give yourself the gift of a pressure-free novel, and just dive in after one week.

-3) Prewriting, especially if you’re very good at it, bleeds some of the fun out of the noveling process. Nothing is more boring than spending an entire month simply inking over a drawing you penciled out months earlier. With the seven-days-and-out timeline, you’ll still have lots of questions about your book when you start writing. Which is great. It makes the writing process one of happy discoveries and keeps the levels of surprise and delight high for you as an author. So as you look over the gaggle of questions about character, plot, setting, and language in the rest of this chapter, know that they are by no means meant as a rigorous checklist to be completed before starting your novel. They’re just a way to help you figure out what you love in novels, and by extension, what you might like to put in yours.

THE TWO MAGNA CARTAS

Let’s start our discussion of your book with a quick exercise.

Using your noveling notebook and pen of wonder, jot down answers to the following question: What, to you, makes a good novel?

It’s an excruciatingly broad question, but give it a shot. And feel free to be as vague or as nerdily detailed as you like; this list can include anything from ultra-short chapters to ribald sex scenes to massive infusions of ill-tempered elves. Anything that floats your fictional boat should go on the list. My list, to help give you some ideas, looks like this:

-first-person narration

-quirky characters

-true love

-found objects

-disappointment

-music

-catharsis

-feisty old people

-strong, charismatic protagonists

-improbable romances

-smart but unpretentious writing

-urban settings

-cliffhanger chapter endings

-characters who are at turning points in their lives

-books set in the workplace

-happy endings

Okay, now make your list. Go crazy, and take as long as you want.

Once you’ve finished, frame it. This document will be your Magna Carta for the next month, helping you channel your awesome writing powers for the good of the people. Why is this list so frame-worthy?

Because the things that you appreciate as a reader are also the things you’ll likely excel at as a writer. These bits of language, color, and technique, for whatever reason, make sense to your creative brain. These are the Things You Understand. And as you draw the basic outlines of your novel over the next week, you should to try to fill that outline in with as many of the juicy elements from the Magna Carta as possible.

If you like it when authors start chapters with quotations, for instance, start gathering some pithy zingers for your story. Are coming-of-age tales your guilty pleasure? Consider setting your story at a summer camp. The chances are good that if a mood, motif, or plot device resonates with you as a reader, you’ll be able to adeptly wield it when you’re in the writer’s seat as well. Okay, that’s the first list. Now on to its equally important sibling... For the second list, write down those things that bore or depress you in novels. Again, feel free to be as specific or wide-ranging as you like. And be honest. If you don’t like books where the words-topictures ratio favors the text too heavily, write that down. We’re not here to judge. We just want to understand you better.

My list would include the following:

-irredeemably malicious main characters

-books set on farms

-mentally ill main characters

-food or eating as a central theme

-ghosts, monsters, or demons

-dysfunctional sibling dramas

-books consisting largely of a character’s thoughts

-weighty moral themes

-books set in the nineteenth century

-unhappy endings

Now it’s your turn. Write down anything and everything that bores you or brings you down in a book. Go.

When you’re finished, frame this list as well. We’ll call it Magna Carta II, the Evil Twin of Magna Carta I.

As you spend the next week thinking about what you want to have in your novel, keep MCII close at hand, so you’ll remind yourself what not to put in your story.

I know it seems silly to have to remind yourself to keep things you dislike out of your novel, but be warned: The stealthy entries on your MCII list are vicious, cunning little buggers, and given the slightest opening, they will find their way into your book.

The reason they’ll make their way onto your pages is related to the same scientific principle of selfbetterment that causes us to bring high-brow tomes home from the bookstore knowing full well they’ll go straight onto the bookshelf and never be touched again until our kids move us and our possessions into that miserable senior home down the road.

We buy these difficult books because we feel that, while not very exciting, they are in some way good for us. It’s a sort of literature-as-bran-flake philosophy: If something is dry and unpalatable, it must be doing something good to our constitutions. This kind of thinking also carries over to the writing realm. If we’re worried that our story lacking in substance, the first thing most of us automatically reach for to fix it are the bran morsels from the MCII.

Still not convinced? Let me offer a real-world example.

When sitting down to craft my second month-long novel, I decided that my previous work—a story about an American music nerd secretly in love with his Scottish green-card wife—had been high on fluff and low on substance.

I was right. So, on my second work, I committed myself to writing a Serious Book. Lacking any appropriately substantial ideas, I simply saddled an otherwise enjoyable main character with an everlengthening roster of mental illnesses, suicidal relatives, and ghosts, handily crushing the protagonist’s spirit under the pressure of weighty moral themes.