Structured Spontaneity

All right, it's the post NaNo Wrap Up!

I meant to post during November, but got kind of overwhelmed trying to write the novel itself. But now it's over, so here we are.

Bottom line, I wrote 50,000 words. 50,148, to be exact. Goal accomplished. So let's talk about it.

Plotting vs. Pantsing
For December's Problem, I went in with a particular plan. The idea was that the general plot arc would be planned out, and the details along the way would be randomly generated. This worked, to a degree.

The plot was this: Our main character, December, would fall into a plot hole--a portal to a parallel world--and she would go on a Sliders-style adventure through different worlds, trying to A) get home, and B) fix whatever was causing the holes. Two main things were randomly generated: the genre, and the incarnation of her friend Steve. The genre was selected from a list of 20 different genres by rolling a 20-sided die, to give me things like Horror or High Fantasy. Steve was pulled from the Big Bag of Steves (or its digital version), giving me prompts like "Steve buys some fireworks" or "Steve has fat stacks of Argentinian Pesos."

Now, when I set out on this adventure, I wanted to have a plot planned out. I wanted basically a list of the things she needed to accomplish, in a genre-neutral way, since I wouldn't know what genre she would be in at any given point. And this worked for a little while. The reason it stopped working was that I didn't finish the outline before I started. So then I ran into the issue I run into a lot, where the story can get potentially repetitive if the goal just becomes "find the next portal, get to the next place." I feel like I did manage to through enough curveballs in to keep the story moving, including immediately dropping her through another portal if I didn't have any good ideas for the genre I was in. But it would have been easier if I had finished the outline.

Metafiction
The story was meant to be very meta, that is, December was meant to know that she was in a novel, and to eavesdrop through the fourth wall. This was harder than I thought it would be. She acknowledged the narrator right off the bat, page one, but then I immediately worried that this would break the entire world, and she wouldn't go about her life as normal if she was just listening in on the narrator all the time. So the narrator tells her to mind her own business, and the story goes on. Then, over the course of the story, the fact that she is aware that this is a fictional world does come back, fairly inconsistently.

Some things that I wanted to do, I didn't. Like NaNoisms (the typos that arise from writing a novel very quickly) that changed the course of the story. So for instance, if someone was supposed to say, "There's a beer in the fridge," but I had instead typed, "There's a bear in the fridge," there would now be a bear in the fridge. I didn’t end up having typos that would change the meaning like that, so I never got to do that.

I also had on my Big List of Possible Ideas™ that perhaps she would relive scenes, slightly different, because she was in a revised version of the story. The book ended up taking a different direction, so that never happened.

There was also the idea that she would be able to hear, essentially, the soundtrack. That is, what I was listening to while I wrote it. This did end up happening once, because it was too perfect not to. I had just rolled Subterranean Fiction (think Journey to the Center of the Earth, mole people, etc.) and there was a line in the song that went, "This is the anthem of the underground." So I had to do something with that.

NaNo Novels Past
As December travelled through various stories, I had to stop and world-build on the fly a lot. So, whenever I could get away with it, I used worlds that I had already built. I have been writing fiction for various NaNoWriMo events since 2010. I have, I think, 28 stories of varying lengths. That's a lot of things I've already created, in a variety of different genres. So, out of the 20 genres in this project, six of them used characters and/or settings from previous projects. Because why would you build a new spaceship for your sci-fi chapter, when you've got a perfectly good one already?

It was interesting to see where in the story December should appear. In the aforementioned sci-fi chapter, she joins the world after the conclusion of that book, and heavily interacts with the main character. In the steampunk chapter, on the other hand, she just sort of walks through the middle of the story, briefly passing the protagonists in the midst of their own adventure.

Cheese
My journey to 50k was not an easy one. I spent most of the month behind schedule. By Day 29, I was just short of 40k. That was the last full day I had to write, as I had to work on the 30th, and because I work nights, by the time I was off work, it would be December, and too late. So whatever I managed to do the morning of the 30th before I went to bed was all I was going to get.

So between midnight and 11am, I logged 10,425 words. Now, these were not all freshly written new words, because I cheesed it. Which is to say, I used every exploit and sneaky tactic to achieve my goal. This largely meant that I added in my notes, my weekly news to my NaNo region, every piece of writing that I had created in the month of November. I wrote it, so I was counting it. Because by the time I had like 47,000 words, I was too close to just… not succeed.

I went back and did some calculations, and this only comprised about 3,000 words. So overall, my novel is only 6% cheese. Down from last year's 12% cheese content.

Some might say this was cheating. Maybe. What are you, the word police? Considering I gain nothing for reaching 50,000, I'm not too worried about it.

That being said, minus the cheese, I still wrote 7,000 fresh new words in 11 hours. It is some of the worst, craziest, most desperate writing I have ever created. I'm kind of afraid to look at it. Like my brain might melt or something.

Final Thoughts
I would not do this again. While randomly rolling genres seems like a fun idea on paper, it got kind of tedious. Many times, I would finish a chapter in Genre X, and think that it would be great if Genre Y would come up next, and it just wouldn't.

I'm not a very good pantser. Just trying to make everything up as I go, I get stuck a lot and don’t know where to go next. I'm also not a very good plotter. I can't seem to just sit down and create an outline. This project was an effort to force me to do both. It was structured spontaneity and it was exhausting.

I don't regret writing this story. It's terribly written and hilarious and a little upsetting. But I'm definitely ready to move on to another project.

But that's December's problem. Or at this point, probably January's problem.