National Novel Writing Month 2019 II

I am in the middle of day 15 of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I already won. In fact, I passed the 50,000-word winning point on day 12 and today I should reach at least 60,000. Last year it took me 15 days to win what is supposed to be a 30-day challenge. I don’t know if winning three days faster than last year shows that I’m getting better, though, or only more obsessed. Still, my life has not gone to pieces as I have sunk whole days into writing. (I found it helps to get up at 3 a.m. and write until early afternoon as if nothing matters except getting this novel into the computer.)

Whatever the reason behind my productivity, I am pleased with what is in my Mac. Editing will trim the text (I am wordy), but I will also fill in details to make a richer narrative. For example, I have not yet physically described any of the characters. Thus, it may not get shorter, although I am sure that I can make it much better. Still, in this first draft I’m discovering so much about the story. It has been interesting to figure out how the protagonist (an academic) meets the various antagonists (all yakuza). I had a basic idea for how the plot would develop, but my preconception had precious little detail for any but the beginning chapters. It is a great feeling when the story flows out and the characters’ arcs intersect in exactly the right ways.

Despite having won NaNoWriMo, there’s plenty of work left for the rest of November. I still need to write whole chapters. And I must fill in the many places where I wrote so quickly that I left holes in the text. (This also involves finding and watching all six seasons of The Sopranos.) I have not kept close track of the flow of time through the novel, and my two first-person narrators need distinct voices. Perhaps the most sensitive job is crafting the right response (or sequence of responses) when the protagonist finds his love interest is not the woman he believed her to be. There are months of work left to do. But this first draft is a “proof of concept.” So far, it works. I am eager to finish this draft and start the months of polishing.

National Novel Writing Month 2019

In 2018, I entered National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and won. Winning does not mean I beat the other entrants. It is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, and I did it (75,100 words). I have signed up to do it again this year, and I am feeling both excitement at writing something new (my first new novel since NaNoWriMo last year), and trepidation over whether I can make the story work. The idea for this novel, The Keeper, is from 2014. I started on it a few times in the past, but could never get past the opening scenes. It begins with a man depressed to the point of being suicidal, but who fears the impact of his suicide on his children. So he decides to get himself murdered. 

At first, I set the novel in the rural southwestern U.S. (in my wife’s hometown), but it did not seem dangerous enough. Plus, I had never lived there, so I did not know the setting intimately enough (although my wife could help with the characters and the flow of life there.) So I switched to the South Side of Chicago, where I lived years ago, a city that has no shortage of murders. But I realized I would need to write parts of the novel in a young, urban U.S. vernacular, and living in Japan, I did not think I could find the help to pull it off. So I set it in urban Tokyo, but faced the problem of the city being far too safe. I think I have solved the problem now, but certainty will come with writing. So far I have only notes and a short tag line: “What’s it take to get yourself murdered in Tokyo? Pretty damn much.”

Last year I started my NaNoWriMo novel two weeks early, but by the last days of November, with the 20,000 words I had written in October, I was 90,000 words in and running out of story. So this year I decided not to start the novel until November 1. If beginning The Keeper turns out to be difficult, as it did before, I will just have to push through it. The novel has been in my head too long and it’s time to get it into my computer. 

With five novels written, I have no doubts about being able to produce 50,000 words. And from winning NaNoWriMo last year, I know I can write the requisite number of words each day for a month. The question is whether I will have time to do all the other things that November will require of me.

Writing buddies

Do you have a writing buddy? Predawn is my favorite time to write. I enjoy the quiet of our small Tokyo apartment in those hours before the street outside begins to bustle. With my Mac set on “dark mode,” I leave most of the lights off. I do, however, turn Miffy on. We got Miffy as a nightlight for our toddler granddaughter, only to discover she already had one she liked. So now Miffy, always stoic, but with a glow so gentle and warm, serves as my early morning writing buddy.

Of course, it helps to have people who can talk back when you want to explore an idea. For that, my first and closest writing buddy is my wife. She is not writing something of her own, so in the strictest sense she is not a writing buddy. (Miffy doesn’t write much either, though she makes the morning more pleasant.) My wife is so involved in everything I write that it’s unusual for me to compose something without showing it to her. I cannot write first drafts strictly for myself, as Stephen King suggests. His wife sees second drafts he has cleaned up. My wife sees everything. She stays encouraging, though, telling me only that something “needs polishing,” not that it’s awful. I like to think it’s because I don’t do awful, but I trust my wife’s charity more than my talent. And when something works especially well, she tells me that too. Those are proud moments, for her judgment stands the test of time better than my own.

As far as writing buddies who do write, I have only one, my friend Jacinta. She’s an Australian who lives in Japan. I met her at a workshop she taught on printing and publishing in January 2018. It was there I began thinking about self-publishing my first novel. (My editor has since convinced me to try going the traditional publishing route, although it is slow enough that I expect I will lose patience before much longer.) In May 2018, I attended a weekend writing retreat Jacinta hosted. There, we agreed to exchange daily writing shout outs to keep each other motivated and writing every day for a month, for it is constancy to purpose that gets a novel written, not momentary genius. At the end of the month, we decided to do it again. That was a year and a half ago, and most days since then we’ve messaged each other with encouragement. She is out of the country now, so rather than another physical writing retreat, we have a three-hour virtual retreat early in the morning on the first Sunday of each month. 

It’s interesting that Jacinta and I share little of what we write. Instead, we share our process and an optimism that if we keep writing, the process will create something worth publishing, for neither of us is writing purely for herself or himself. Maybe that’s what’s most important in a writing buddy, someone who shares the same dream. Jacinta does. My wife does too. And I trust Miffy does. She won’t say.

Tokyo Writers Workshop

On Sunday afternoon, I attended Tokyo Writers Workshop (TWW). In one form or another, it has been meeting for over thirty years and is a wonderfully eclectic group of writers. We meet once a month to critique each other’s work.  I submitted chapter 1 of Neyuki, and I am thankful for the valuable feedback I received.  I also had the chance to hear others’ comments for the various submissions.  My first impression was that my responses were woefully lacking in detail and I must up my game if I want to be a contributing member of the group.  It was also fascinating to see the submissions through others’ eyes.  Things I had dismissed lightly were discussed in the context of genres of fiction with which I was unfamiliar, and I learned that some I thought were “out there” were actually mainstream.  Again my too thin reading experience came back to bite me.  I will look at future submissions with kinder, more supportive eyes.

Regarding Neyuki, there was no real consensus in the group as to what changes were necessary, although many thought the chapter needed to move faster.  As a result, I moved some descriptions of the setting into the next chapter.  I also added more tension to the scene where Will hides the body.  Overall, the pacing is better than before. Still, it would move even faster if I cut it by 20 percent. That is this weekend’s task.

There were also questions about why a good man would move his colleague’s corpse rather than just call the police, so I heightened Will’s fear of involvement with the Japanese police and strengthened the logic he follows.  I also set up his logical thought process, which struck some as cold, as an escape Will turns to when reality is too awful and terrifying to countenance.

The one thing on which everyone seemed to agree was the first chapter effectively hooks the reader.  That was my biggest question.  I wish I could have gotten everyone’s feedback on the entire novel.  To submit it piece by piece to the group would take most of two years, and I hope to publish it long before that.  I can, though, submit the pieces that worry me.  There will be plenty of time for those before publication.

National Novel Writing Month III

I won NaNoWriMo! I beat the 50,000-word challenge of National Novel Writing Month with a total of 75,100 words. With the writing I did in October, that gives me a 95,000-word draft of my fifth novel.

National Novel Writing Month II

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has been invigorating, but it has also taken a lot of time.  I finished the thirty-day challenge of 50,000 words in only fifteen days, yesterday, because I have written on average over six hours per day.  That is not a pace I can keep up forever.  Interestingly, I am surprised that it has interfered with my work as little as it has.  It has stopped some other things, though.  I have made very little progress in my edit of Neyuki.  

I did not have Vision More Glorious all plotted out before I started writing.  All that I knew was that I wanted it all to be from the point of view of one first-person narrator (a new exercise for me), and that it would deal with a psychiatric outpatient who takes an experimental drug and has his vision dramatically changed.  What flowed out first was a (hopefully) sweet love story.  I found at the 30,000-word point of NaNoWriMo (50,000 words total, since I had 20,000 already in the dozen days before November began), that the love story was close to its climax and was leaving me wanting something more, so in the writing after that, it become a novel of suspense as well.  Then at about the 45,000 word point, I found the suspense was getting out of hand and the whole thing was becoming too fantastic, and the ending thereafter became more lighthearted.  I feel like I now have parts of three different novels.  Over the next few weeks, I will get a better idea of what I want to do with what I have written and begin filling in the missing pieces of one of those three novels.  I actually have two weeks of NaNoWriMo left.  I hope to make some progress in that time.

National Novel Writing Month

The Japan Writers Conference inspired me to sign up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  The NaNoWriMo challenge is to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, starting November 1.  I actually started the novel a little bit early on October 19 and had 20,000 words by the end of the month, which is fine, because another 50,000 words will not complete it.  The working title is Vision More Glorious, and it’s about a psychiatric patient who is given an experimental medication.  As I wrote in the synopsis of the novel for NaNoWriMo, “When life gleams all too transcendent—outstripping even your most vivid imagination—how could things possibly end well?”

The writing these last two weeks has been challenging, but a lot of fun at the same time.  It is my first “new story” writing since I started work on the big edit of Under Shōko’s Bed back in August.  It feels good to be writing again, not just editing.  I am trying, though, to edit each day as well, so I am also working on Neyuki.  Add all of that to a full-time job and it has me wishing that days were a few hours longer.  How about a nice, round number like thirty?

Japan Writers Conference 2018

Last weekend, I attended the 2018 Japan Writers Conference in Otaru, a beautiful town in Hokkaidō on the Sea of Japan.  My thanks go out to John Gribble and Karen McGee, the conference coordinators, and Shawn Clankie, our host at Otaru University of Commerce.

It was not a large conference.  There were about forty sessions on three tracks.  So it was big enough to get an interesting mix of topics, but intimate enough to see the same faces repeatedly, so that soon they were no longer strangers.  I got to see Jacinta Plucinski and Chris Akiba Wang from Hackerfarm, reconnect with an old friend, Gregory Dunne, and make new friends like Warren Decker, David Gregory, Min Ku, Kai Raine, and Eric Selland.  I met and talked with so many interesting people, and all were passionate like me, trying to become better writers, welcoming dialogue and feedback.

The sessions were excellent, but the one that may have the most lasting effect was Charles Kowalski’s on creating suspense.  It so inspired me that I am now increasing the suspense, ratcheting up the tension, in my second novel, Neyuki.  I think that is what the novel has been missing.

I look forward to having something published by the time the 2019 Japan Writers Conference rolls around.  Perhaps I can make a presentation about the whole experience.