NaNoWriMo 2005

I don't know if speedwriting is really the best way to write a novel or not but I'm proud to be able to say that I'm a NaNoWriMo 2005 Winner!

50,000 words (minimum) in a month (mine was 50,960) gains a win. NaNo closed for the year yesterday although I had passed the wordcount requirement the day after Thanksgiving (many Thanks!).

My novel was inspired by the industry in which I have worked for the past 8 years or so, the Elevator industry. It's called 'Lift' which is a common word used in Europe for Elevator. Although the title has other convenient meanings in English, the theme of the novel is actually not directly tied to it other than a building and its elevators prominently figure in the storyline. I just like one word titles. It's actually about the lifecycle of a building in a large city (unspecified) and although much of the action takes place in or around the elevators, the story is really about the people that work in and inhabit the building and use the elevators. Since buildings usually last a long while, the story spans generations. It wound up being almost, but not quite, a series of short stories that intertwine with each other. The building and its elevators are the glue that hold the whole 'twine' together, much like R2D2 and C3PO span all the Star Wars movies (although, I guess one could say Anakin/Darth Vader and Senator/Emperor Palpatine do as well).

I don't know if this effort will be publishable in the end or not. I know I have to expand it by almost double and do a tremendous amount of rewrite and edit before it would even be presentable. Then, I don't know if it's any good. I could produce a technically perfect piece of work and spend the National Debt circulating it to agents and publishers and only come out of it with enough rejection slips to paper the bathroom (or maybe the whole house!).

My purpose for doing NaNo at all was mostly to...do it. And by that I mean, do it to completion. No 20,000 words and then out. No, sir. In for a penny, in for a pound. Previously I've written up to 30,000 words, or so, in attempts at novels but the only one I have gotten to completion so far is in worse shape than this NaNo effort I just finished. And it's WAY too short. Lots of other ideas for more where these came from, though, and I wanted to see if the juices could start flowing.

One thing NaNo did was increase my writing efficiency. Always one to write an overly long email, I found I can sustain writing speeds of about 1,000 words an hour for new prose, including the time spent staring at the keyboard trying to figure out what the main character is supposed to do next. I have lots of editing to do on that raw prose but after rereading the whole draft, I've got to say, in my own humble opinion, that it's not too bad. A few logistics problems but overall the timelines are consistent, the characters don't change names halfway through, and there is an arc to the whole thing. Too many weak verbs, to be sure, and too many "to be" verbs but here and there it's not too bad.

Not one to dwell on my own opinion, I am starting to have family members read it. My oldest son who, at 14, would rather read just about anything but a non-action book with lots of people and relationships, said: "a few times I was reading along like it was a regular book and suddenly realized 'Hey, Dad wrote this!'" I couldn't ask for a better compliment other than a royalty check.

And my writing buddy for this year's NaNo, our daughter (who hides out somewhere on this same blog site), won, too. We're very proud of her for getting through the lean times in the middle of the month when she was having a hard time getting her story off the ground and persevering to the end to cross the finish line! With minutes to spare. She could have written at least 50 more words in the time she had left. I'm poking some fun but she really "stepped up," to borrow terminology from The Apprentice, and put it in high gear and finished the mission. And the best part is she has a story that I think is a real winner. If some publisher doesn't contract her for a three book deal based on this first one, they don't know what they're doing. There are great characters, an interesting premise, and a process that once established in the first book can be used to support many different storylines. I won't give any of it away (that's her privelige) but I think she's really onto something.

The real irony is that she wrote Science Fiction and I wrote Literary Fiction when I'm much more at home READING Science Fiction and she dearly loves Literary Fiction. We basically wrote each other's book. Oh well. It was a blast. Mostly the crossing the 50,000 word part was a blast. Waking up at 3am in a hotel room in Europe and writing my way through jetlag was not a blast. It was an incredibly effective use of jetlag and time but it was not a blast.

Can't wait until November, 2006.