jtr's 2024 National Novel Editing Month Retro
Gamification is the art of tricking yourself into doing the things you want to do.
2024-12-02
Click here for the podcast about this retro.
What Happened?
I tried a new timed writing challenge this year: NaNoEdMo (National Novel Editing Month). It was a success and it was a learning process.
This is a retro about my National Novel Editing Month, November 2024. It is not a retro about the entire process of writing this novel (which is not complete), nor is it about all of my previous National Novel Writing Months.
Backstory
Since 2002, every November I have undertaken a challenge called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which you try to write a 50,000 word novel during the calendar month of November. I bent the rules and have been working on the same novel, year after year: every year, for that one month, I added on to that same novel, on a quest to find its conclusion (and, in the process, to become better at telling a story).
In 2022, I escaped the clutches of capitalism, declared my new life “Eternal November,” and started figuring out what it would mean to do creative work on my own deadlines, after 24 years of being a cog in the machine of Silicon Valley tech companies.
In June of 2024, I completed the first draft of the story!
I went to a print shop and printed it out (it turns out it’s going to be a trilogy). I read a bunch of books on how to do the second draft – actually, there are almost no books on this, but many books on writing devote a chapter or half a chapter to it – and I cobbled together a strategy.
I don’t know where this aphorism originated, but: the first draft is you telling the story to yourself; the second draft is you telling it to someone else.
I did a reread, keeping notes on several categories of things that leapt out at me, especially:
Decisions Not Made
Inconsistencies
Simple Edits
Things I Love
“Things I Love” was important to help me keep in mind that creation is joy; analysis can drain the fun out, and sometimes you need to actively raise up the parts that bring you joy. (The same logic as the “What worked” part of the retro format.)
“Simple Edits” were things I could correct easily – typos, simple fact checks, bad word choices.
“Inconsistencies” was deeper stuff. Some of it would be relatively easy to fix: timeline issues, foreshadowing that’s slightly off. But some of it is deeper, and started to wander into the territory of the most interesting category:
“Decisions Not Made.” Though I kept a bunch of notes while writing, I wrote the plot intuitively, and I had a habit (bad or not, who can say) of throwing in references to things I had not yet fully worked out. Often I later rose to the occasion and figured out a satisfying way to tie off that reference. But many times I ended up with a little mystery for myself. What are the relative ages of the male main character’s brothers and sisters, and what does that mean about their mindsets as he was going through his formative moments? How big is the riverboat those other characters are stuck on? What was the first villain’s actual secret plot, before it was foiled and she had to flee backwards through time? Why is the secret world government a parliamentary democracy if it’s the uneasy union of two oligarchic predecessor nations?
I also did some structural analysis – figuring out what should go in each of the three volumes, figuring out the rough structure and focus of each volume, etc.
November came closer; I knew I had to do something to celebrate it. I considered NaNoWriMo-compatible (that is, word-count-oriented) writing projects, but I was deep in the throes of the quest for a second draft. While the work ahead of me was creative – I had a lot of “Inconsistencies” and “Decisions Not Made” for which to find creative solutions – it was more in the vein of problem-solving than brainstorming, and a word-count focused goal didn’t feel right.
Enter NaNoEdMo
Long ago, I saw references to a NaNoWriMo sibling challenge which was focused on editing the draft you had, theoretically, dashed off in a single November (though it took me 22+): NaNoEdMo. Suddenly this seemed like a useful idea.
Unfortunately, the NaNoEdMo website no longer existed. I found an article saying the original website had gone off the air and somebody had bought a different domain and relaunched it – but the new domain was now off the air too. There were articles (and grainy YouTube videos) of people talking about their NaNoEdMo experiences, and a semi-official-looking wiki page full of broken links. The main rule I was able to glean was: devote 50 hours during a calendar month to editing.
Different people seem to have put different restrictions on what they would count as hours of editing, but I figured I’d give myself a 50 hour goal and allow only things that are useful for the current phase of my story to be counted. Through trial and error, I built up this list to:
Filling out my private wiki explaining all my characters and events and species and concepts and locations etc. and how they relate to one another, and use this wiki to explore and settle the “Inconsistencies” and make the decisions called out in “Decisions Not Made.”
Finding art, or generating AI art, to illustrate said wiki.
Any calculations or small software tools needed to answer questions in (1).
Garbagehole (that is, scratch writing, on a sliding scale of relatedness to the novel).
FAQ
What is a private wiki and why would you have one for a story?
It’s actually an Obsidian vault, but either way, it’s a bunch of small articles with links between them. Many writers keep notes behind the scenes so they don’t contradict themselves on details like a character’s eye color or home town; many TV shows, because they have much more expansive history, create something called a story bible that covers background elements much more thoroughly. My story is psychedelic weird fiction that unfolds over decades of story time, with bespoke cosmology and counterfactual physics and reinterpretations of real history. There ended up being a lot to keep track of.
Isn’t AI art evil plus also theft plus also contrary to the very human principles of creativity you claim to hold so dear?
That’s between you and your god. I will comment that the AI art generator struggled and failed at a lot of what I asked it to do. And also nobody besides me ever has to see its output.
By “finding art” do you mean stealing images from Google Image Search?
Yes. I’m not selling the story bible wiki, it’s just for me.
Why would you need calculations or software to solve “Inconsistencies” or “Decisions Not Made?” Am I going to open your novel and walk into a wall of calculus?
The particular kind of story I’m telling is one where everything on the surface seems normal and realistic, then under the surface everything is surreal and psychedelic, but then all the surreal psychedelia turns out to follow its own rigorous logic, just not the logic of our universe. (This is related to the concept of “hard magic systems” – magic is made up, yes, but some stories’ magic follows clear rules, becoming a sort of alternate reality natural law.) For my story to follow its own rigorous logic, I need to do some calculations:
How big does the hole at the top of the glass pit (the one the flaming winged aurochs dug when she crashed into the desert from orbit) look to our heroes at the bottom?
How fast does the Earth cool down if the sun is snuffed out, given it contains water and air and other fluids that retain heat, and that the sun-Earth distance averages 499 light-seconds?
What’s the height difference between two six-legged paraceratherium (paraceratheria?) of similar relative proportions, if one is twice as massive as the other?
If you’re not familiar, here’s what a (simpler, quadrupedal) paraceratherium looks like:
For the constructed language, which is based on a fictional hybridization of two real languages, how does vocabulary from the parent languages evolve under the constructed language’s phonemic system? (Imagine a series of changes similar to the real life example of Grimm’s Law.)
<silent, confused stare>
I promise the calculus is hidden, and not necessary to appreciate the story. (Though I think math is fun and that our society just teaches it badly, which fools some people into thinking they don’t like it.) I just like the kind of story where that stuff hangs together if you choose to dig it out and look at it — even if I never do, I like the feeling that the world is well-worked out.
Why is there a “garbagehole,” and why would you count it?
This will be discussed more in “What Worked” and “Lessons Learned,” but the garbagehole is a tactic I introduced during some previous NaNoWriMo; it’s easy to make too big a deal in your head of the whole huge romantic idea of writing a novel, which is obviously something difficult and ponderous that you can only do when you’re in the throes of divine inspiration. Calling something “garbagehole,” and having no quality or relevance bar, removes that psychic barrier and lets me sit down and start writing something. Once I’ve started, it’s then much easier to transition into writing the things I really want to have written.
Difficulties in Resurrecting a Dead-ish Challenge
I understand the philosophy behind NaNoWriMo. Many novelists, including myself, have absorbed a false narrative that good writing is inspired, and that therefore you shouldn’t write until inspiration strikes, and that it’s better to write a few great words than a lot of mediocre ones. But this is all wrong and backwards.
Inspiration is summoned by writing, not the other way around.
It’s lots of writing that makes you good at writing, not waiting till the moment is perfect. Perfectionism during the creation process smothers creativity. You need to turn off your critical mind during the creation phase; you can come back later and edit. The aphorism “You can’t edit a blank page” is deeper than it sounds.
One of my first post-college creative writing classes was with Clive Matson, who has a writing manual called Let the Crazy Child Write, which uses a model similar to transactional analysis to argue that you have three writing personae: the crazy child (the source of creativity), the writer (who tries to balance creativity and rigor), and the editor (who can clean and sharpen but not create). He argues that too often we start with the more grown-up personae when we sit down to write, but that actually the initial writing process needs to focus on unleashing the crazy child.
NaNoWriMo forces you to focus on quantity instead of quality, and this, ironically, creates a higher quality product by unleashing the crazy child, getting the creativity onto the page – and getting you out of your own way.
There doesn’t seem to be anything as deep behind NaNoEdMo. Maybe that’s why it keeps disappearing off the internet.
Sure, showing up and spending time is meaningful. But with word count, I have a little counter in the corner of my screen that has something to do with the work I’ve done. With NaNoEdMo, if I start a timer and sit down at my computer and then fall asleep, the counter keeps running.
Another thing I appreciated about NaNoWriMo proper is that there is a widget on their website to track word count; seeing the graph go up and to the right is motivating, for some reason. I ended up creating a custom project on the NaNoWriMo website to track my editing, but because there was no clear way to tell it how much time I was spending, I decided I was going to report 1000 words for every hour spent, so that a 50,000 word target really meant a 50 hour target (or 50,000 millihours, if there were such a thing).
Lessons Learned
What Worked?
Succeeded in my challenge – 52.294 hours logged, above the target of 50!
The garbagehole was a great way to unblock myself at the beginning of the day.
For some reason, if I started by looking at the Obsidian vault, I couldn’t focus. But if I started by going to the garbagehole and typing a little bit about what I was thinking and what I wanted to get done and what was bothering me, whether it was inside or outside the story, it seemed to warm me up to the point where I could do some work.
There was a spectrum of conceptual difficulty in the wiki. Some articles were challenging: I had to figure out the history of a character to explain some later choice, and that required focus and creativity; or I had to figure out some esoteric detail of the “magic system” that seemed to be inconsistent, but the plot depended on it. Other articles were simple: find a picture of a cute cat with a scratched ear, type some stuff about cats. Or add an image to an existing page. Or put some links in between pages that already exist. I started calling the latter kind of work “wiki gardening” – I wasn’t planting new trees, I was just weeding and trimming. But it made the wiki feel clean and pretty, which somehow psychologically made it easier to do the harder work when I had the headspace for it.
Many of the harder problems turned into little puzzles that I thought about in the back of my head while out doing other things, and my subconscious mind would sometimes present me with nice solutions.
The time-oriented goal is very flexible, so I was able to arrange it around other things, like podcasting and holidays.
I took the “Inconsistencies” and “Decisions Not Made” articles and compiled the open questions into an article called “List of Essays,” and whenever I was at a loss as to what to work on next, I could scan the List of Essays for something unfinished to pick up.
About midway through the month, I realized this would work better if I put checkmarks next to essays that were adequately worked out.
Writing little software tools felt like a fun shift of gear, and it is a much easier way to spend time insofar as when I’m debugging I sort of get in the zone and pop up later realizing I’ve put a lot of hours on the clock, whether or not the problem is fixed. (I could look at this as a negative, but I don’t think I will.)
The garbagehole and the List of Essays served as good default starting points when I was at a loss as to what to do next.
What Didn’t Work?
The AI art generator did not understand what I was talking about more than half the time. It is particularly hopeless with paraceratheria, no matter how many legs you’re talking about.
I gave myself no topic/article prioritization; while this had benefits (e.g. being able to pick up easier or harder tasks depending on mood and attention span), I feel some discomfort knowing that I haven’t cracked the case on some of the hardest puzzles.
In particular, there’s a complex of issues around the moral consequences of the decisions made by some of the characters; I don’t think it’s necessary to solve every moral quandary, but there should be enough grappling/exploration that it won’t feel like I’m uncritically endorsing the various batshit actions of my characters.
The article about an imaginary species called “Futant Rats” is very long, whereas the article about the real species called “Humans” is just a stub, which resulted in my brother laughing at me and calling over his wife to look.
I don’t know exactly how I’m going to keep track of all the changes I have to make to the story based on the decisions I’m making in the essays.
There’s no NaNoEdMo website; while I was able to use the NaNoWriMo tracker, my use was weird and non-standard.
Time is a very soft goal – as I mentioned, nothing keeps me from staring off into space while the stopwatch is running, let alone forgetting it’s running and going on a wikipedia or email side quest. But in practice I found I was good at catching myself and creating a habit of either going back to the garbagehole or to the List of Essays when I was at a loose end.
Time management in “Eternal November” is hard. I would like to not use my lunch breaks for something I classify as work, even if it’s fun work, but it turned out to be necessary given the squishiness of the rest of my schedule (to be clear, “necessary” because I wasn’t always rigorous about getting my other work done in a timely fashion).
Where did I get lucky?
I still find this story world fun, 23 years in.
What will I change next time?
I’m going to continue working on the story bible wiki, likely without the structure of another NaNoEdMo. By next November I expect to be in a completely different phase, or working on a new story.
Making a prioritized list of the hardest/biggest questions would be useful; some days, sure, I’ll be doing gardening, but some days I’ll want to plug away on one of the hard problems, or have them in the back of my head while I’m taking a walk.
Sort of off topic for this NaNoEdMo specifically, but a lot of the last 23 Novembers was spent creating work I have to straighten out now: it turns out I’m pretty good at putting in an evocative teaser that implies there’s a cool resolution – but without first figuring out what the cool resolution will be. I think it’s a technique that can be useful during the writing process (assuming you are allowing yourself multiple drafts), but it should be thought of as similar to taking out loans: do it in reasoned and manageable chunks, and spend writing time paying off old loans rather than burying yourself under new ones.
Some late discoveries that I would implement earlier:
Set up the garbagehole and List of Essays as a home base.
Start in the garbagehole every morning.
Use checkmarks in the List of Essays so there’s a clear sense of progress, and what remains to be done.
Stretch: try to do some drawings. I don’t think I could do hexapod paraceratheria much justice, but I do have some schematics and maps, and I definitely found that my creativity benefited from using different modes (not just writing but also software and art).
Timeline
2002-Nov: novel begins.
2003-Nov: novel rebooted.
{2004..2023}-Nov: additional installments added to rebooted novel.
2022-Oct: Robinhood fires me; I enter early retirement.
2023-Dec through 2024-Mar: writing every weekday.
2024-Apr: Camp NaNoWriMo (custom goal, 16000 words in the month).
2024-May: writing every weekday.
2024-Jun: first draft of novel completed.
ABC Imaging print shop prints out my novel, now revealed as a trilogy.
2024-Jul: letting the novel rest in its juices.
2024-Aug and Sep: I reread the novel, taking notes.
2024-Nov: NaNoEdMo, topic of this retro.