Essay: Love in the Time of Nanowrimo (Patreon)

Love in the Time of Nanowrimo

Greetings, fellow travelers on the mad and lonesome road!

The road is muddy and frozen and nasty at the moment. Along with an unseasonable nor’easter that left us out of power with a ruined roof, we’ve broken a thirty year record for early cold in November SO THAT’S FANTASTIC. It leaves us with a weird view out the windows, as there are still green leaves on some trees and a flower or too bravely making a statement but it is cold as a Republican’s heart out there. Not that the littlest Laboratory creature minds. It was 14 degrees the other day and he just yanked off his shoes, socks, mittens, and hat in his stroller and glared at me triumphantly like I’LL DO IT AGAIN TOO BRING ON THE ICE CAPADES LADY.

That said, there is something just so damn nice about curling up inside in the warm with a mug of something and writing away the grey outside. I do most of my heavy literary lifting in the winter as I only have my office from September to May, so in some sense, garbage weather out, slightly less garbage art within is my natural habitat. 

It can be forever spring in your book, even when the gales of November come early.

And of course, November brings us Nanowrimo, that time of year when it seems like everyone is writing something, working toward that magical 1667 words a day, falling behind, getting ahead, all the jazz that’s fit to blow.

I’ve talked about Nanowrimo before, and told the story of my experience with it. (Short version: my first novel was written for Nano, but in October and in ten days because 22 is a weird age) Since I’m almost always on a deadline in November, I’m usually participating unofficially. I think that having started out with this kind of intense marathon writing permanently wired my book-brain into this kind of process. It’s almost always the way I do it. When I take a long time to write a book, I often give up on it. I just function better that way. That said, now that I have a smol one, I’m running directly into the brick wall of My Process That Has Always Worked for Me Now Does Not Work for Someone Else. 

But despite struggling to re-wire myself a little bit, I still find that my best work is my fast work. My best books were all written in 8 weeks or less, some much less, and I am well aware that part of why this HAS worked for me for so long is that it is an extremely effective way to outrun my ADD, which would otherwise have had me never finish a thing for leaping to the next shiny project. The fixation on numbers also appeals to me as a lifelong obsessive counter—marathon writing fit neatly into the specific ways in which my brain is not a normal brain.

Ironically, in all the years I’ve been talking about this, I’ve always been so careful to note that the planning and researching of a novel takes far longer than the typing, and 8 weeks does not cover the time between the idea and the execution, which is often years, and I said all that shit knowing goddamn well that my most successful books, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and Space Opera, were both written in 8 weeks with absolutely no planning beforehand whatsoever, as purely by the seat of my pretty dress as it is possible to fly. But that is not a nice thing to put in a lesson plan as it helps no one, and frankly, it doesn’t even help me, because you can’t repeat accidents, and the further away from a book you get, the less you remember about just how exactly you pulled it off.

It is, of course, perfectly all right if you are a slow writer. Fuck me, it’s probably better. Suzanne Clarke took ten years to write Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and you can’t knock that. If the process results in a finished work and a happy human, it is a good process. This is just one I know a lot about, as it’s how I’ve written almost forty books in 17 years.

So let’s talk about Nanowrimo. Let’s talk about writing fast. 

One of the best parts about screaming through a project (whether it’s a book or anything else) in an absurdly short time frame is it short circuits the asshole part of yourself that hates everything the other parts produce and sneers at them and questions every choice and sits back all self-satisfied like it did something important while you crumple into a pile. You’re moving too fast to second-guess your choices.

And all good writing is choices. 

You simply don’t have a full day to dither over what color a character’s horse is. You have to go with your first flash of inspiration. You have to charge down the first path you see and hope to god there isn’t a dead hippo lying on the crossroads. But honestly, most of the time, your first flash is the good stuff. Sometimes you’ll come up with something better in the edit, but this isn’t about post-production, it’s about getting the footage on camera and worrying about the rest later. And if you do this kind of writing enough, your brain will train itself to throw up the exciting, chewy, flashy ideas quickly, or else. I have always found this exhilarating and freeing, as I am extremely prone to second guessing myself and calling myself many creative names while picking apart my choices until there’s nothing left. If I allow myself to do this, I end up with 50,000 words that are literally just ten different openings to the same novel and no idea which is the right one THIS TOTALLY ISN’T A THING THAT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW HA HA OH GOD HELP.

I am simply not a good enough person to write slowly. I need the outside structure because I can’t provide it for myself. I need the speed because I don’t have enough confidence to make good choices for much longer than 8 weeks at a time. I hate myself too much to do anything but make my leap of faith into the dark—I have enough juice for the leap, not for long-haul flights. 

One of the things about Nanowrimo culture I always hated, and remember, I’ve been involved with it since year 2, is the constant mantra that writing crap is fine, the only way to do this is to not care. I’ve always thought that was a shit attitude, and it never worked for me. That didn’t make me feel like I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted, it made me feel like I was doomed to be trash from the start, and I can think I’m trash at home for free and twice on Sundays. 

But now that I’m old trash, and I’ve had a lot of time to trash around and think about it, it is actually kind of true. You have to not care. What they’ve got wrong is what you have to not care about.

If you’re doing this at all, you care about your writing. Oh, babies, of course you care. You care so much. You care about your characters and your setting and your story and your words. If you didn’t, jesus christ there’s a lot better and easier and flashier things to do with your November than this shit that doesn’t even look good on Instagram. Everyone on the Nano forums can bravado about writing crap all they want, but deep down, all of us hope we’re making something amazing, that people will like it, that the magic is gonna happen. And it can. It does. Caring about your work when you’re in the thick of making it is your superpower. Care the fuck out of it. Care Bear Stare it down. Put all your heart and love and want and disappointment and need and frustration and hope into that 50,000 words because that’s how you create something worth reading and that’s how you summon the magic down to you. I have no interest in reading a book by someone who doesn’t care, and when it comes right down to it, neither do you. Caring about books is what makes us the lovable dorks we are.

But you can’t care about the other stuff. It’s so subtle, but you have to excise the care right out of your body.

You can’t care about what happens to the book after you’re done with it, and you can’t care about the other books you might have written.

The second one is what I’ve been talking about. Writing is choices. How does it begin, where is it set, where do they go, what happens to them on the way. And every time you make a choice, in that hippy-physics-crushed-butterfly-chaos-dinosaur-two-hurricanes-diverged-in-a-quantum-wood way, another book you could have written falls away and ceases to be, or becomes in another universe where you are a thylacine. Maybe that book was better than the one you’re writing here in this non-thylacine universe. Maybe it’s worse. Maybe the other one is a hit and this one never gets published. Maybe this one is the greatest work of human literature. You can’t know and you’re not going to know because those other books where the protagonist had red hair instead of black or was an avatar of Odin or a talking liquor cabinet are gone and you can’t get them back. So you can’t care. You have to make choices wildly, with abandon, with a confidence so big and bright it can only last 30 days, and you can’t care that you might have chosen wrong, because here and now in this moment, in this book, on this day, you can’t choose wrong. Big desk energy, baby. The choice you make is the right one right now, and you can fix it in the edit if you have to. You carve this book out of the other books that might have been like a statue out of marble and when it’s done it’s David or it’s a lump, but it’s yours and it’s what it was meant to be. Good lump. Pretty lump. Precious lump.

Let this be the universe in which you are a thylacine, striped and toothed and devouring everything with delight.

But that first thing. It’s complicated.

Publishing is a big deal and it’s super important if you want to make a career of this or even just have people other than your mum read what you wrote. But you can’t give a shit about that when you’re writing this fast. You can’t worry about the market and you can’t worry about agents and editors and the future of print when the days are flying past. But that’s not even really what I mean. 

You can’t care about what happens to this book when you’re done with it. People are (hopefully) going to read it. People are going to love it and hate it. People are going to see parts of you you forgot you even put in there. Everyone who reads this book, if you did it right, is going to see you naked and you can’t give one solitary fuck about that. You have to be vulnerable and you have to be raw and you have to be every character in this thing as fully and completely as possible, be authentic in their skin and yours at the same time, and it’s scary and real and messed up and confessional and everybody is gonna see it and you can’t care. If I take a minute to think about what I’ve put out there, the intensely personal work I’ve published, all the working out of trauma and desperate expressions of hope and fear and self and other, the absolute me-ness of my books, I’m totally fucking horrified. I’d never have the guts to be that open and honest in every day life. But strangers have just swum laps in my heart for fifteen years and I have to look at them at signings when we both know what I did and how intimate it was and it’s really even worse than that because my dad has read Palimpsest and if I allow myself to consider that for more than twelve seconds I quite literally want to die. It’s all out there, all my insides are out there for people to thumb through and call me a pretentious talentless fuck or brilliant or both or neither, to take all my dismembered care bear parts and carefully sew them into their souls or dump them in the bin but either way it was my whole self and my whole worth on every page and everyone touched it and it’s weird and gross and upsetting and I don’t care, I’LL DO IT AGAIN TOO BRING ON THE ICE CAPADES LADY.

You have to not care. You have to dump your entire soul onto paper and not care about the mess. The mess is the art. The mess is life. The mess is what you leave behind when you go. The mess is beautiful and it’s you. It’s a little tiny bomb of you sent out into the world to explode over and over in places you’ll never guess or see and if you cared too much, if you held back because you wanted it tidier, the fuse won’t light and the fire won’t catch.

And we’re in this for the fire. 

So go, make words, care, but not about that stuff. Care for your words and your people and the little universe you are making with your hands. Time is a total asshole, and if you can wrestle a book (or any other damn thing) out of thirty days of it, you win. You crystallized those hours, those hours and the person you were leading up to them and through them and with them, into something real and tangible that exists outside of you and can never be taken away. A book folds time. It makes a crease between the moment it was written and the endless infinite moments in which it is read, moments which would never otherwise touch, and makes them sisters and brothers and family. A book defeats entropy. A book defeats loneliness. A book defeats everything that separates us.

Get hype, because you are worth the hype, and what’s inside you is weird and gross and upsetting and beautiful and magical and unique and the world is full of people who want to see it, because we’re human beings and we’ll do anything to feel transported for just a day. That’s the sacred work you do, the fire and the care and the not care and the thylacines and the ice capades.

Stop caring. Start making a mess.