Nano Lessons

There's a lot of chatter on the writing blogs I read when Nano rolls around--do you just end up with a bunch of crap? Is it actually useful? Etc. And now the blogs are asking: What did you learn this year from doing Nano?

The first year I did Nano I tried to create an actual complete story in 50 000 words. I didn't do that the next two times, because there are few books that are really that length--instead I write the first 50 000 words of a book and don't worry about getting to the end. I end up with something much more useful in the end--I end up with a dry run of my book.

The company I work for (like many) has a "pilot" period for any project it wants to roll out. I think they usually try the project in one or two stores first, and then roll it out to a larger group of pilot stores, and then roll in out in waves. And of course the point of being a pilot store is to find all the mistakes--because no matter how much you plan something out, there's no replacement for experience.

Nano is my pilot store. No matter how much I try to plot a book out, there are ideas I just can't come up with until I start writing. That's when I finally fill in the plotting holes, and try out my characters, and see who needs cutting, what scenes need revising, etc. For that reason I force myself to do zero editing on my Nano--it's a waste of time because the entire thing will get re-written.

So now I'm going to start up my "post-mortem" -- what worked, what didn't work, and how to fix. And hopefully I'll be ready for another draft in January or February.