The Graphic Novel

For an event that explicitly reduces the art of long-form prose fiction to the pursuit of a single number, National Novel Writing Month puts out really terrible graphs.

Note how neither axis has its single most important number labelled.

Problems with this graph

It’s a bar chart.

Look at those thirty little rectangles, clearly indicating exactly how many words I had at the end of each day. But except on day 30, we don’t really care about the total: we care about the change. We’re not interested in comparing the number of words on day 10 with the number on day 20. We know what the relationship there will be: day 20 will be higher. We’d be much better off with a line graph:

Now it’s super easy to see which parts are steep and which parts are shallow. Much more useful.

It’s the only one.

NaNoWriMo.org crashing is as much a part of the event as writing stories is, so I won’t hold this one against them. If they still had ridiculous fluff like big animated books for your extract, then I might, but they seem to have scrapped those.

Nonetheless, it would be nice to have graphs showing, say, how many words I produced per day.

The biggest bar, incidentally, is when my wife went away for the weekend. You should keep that in mind when performing your own interpretations of these statistics.

Or we could take the target line on the basic wordcount graph and make it horizontal, giving a nice clear picture of how far behind or ahead I was through the month. Not that I was ever ahead.

Or we could ask a more interesting question, and plot the relationship between how many words I wrote and how far behind I was at the start of that day.

The “behindness index” here is calculated by dividing the average number of words I need to write per day from that day onwards by 1666⅔, the average number words you need to write every day to hit 50,000 on the 30th. It therefore accounts for how many days are left to make up for past unproductivity.

I think there’s a hint of a positive correlation there. Of course, correlation isn’t the same as causation, and there may be a third factor at play here: the further behind I was, the more frequently my wife told me (in a nice, supportive way) that I probably wasn’t going to manage it this year and I should condsider downgrading my expectations. I suspect she was secretly doing this so that I would strengthen my resolve, just to be obtuse.

On reflection, perhaps they shouldn’t go this far. It’s a bit sad, isn’t it?

It’s inaccurate

Perhaps the silliest part of the National Novel Writing Month tradition is ‘validation’. This is the process of pasting your entire manuscript into a little edit box and letting its wordcount algorithm do its stuff. It automatically updates your wordcount for the day and, if you’re over the line, declares you a winner.

Because I wasn’t about to engage in this absurdity every day, the last bar on my chart is based on a different wordcount algorithm than the others. (A less generous one, as it happens.) And why? To make it infinitessimally harder to lie about your final wordcount? I find it hard to believe that any of the organisers care about that: it’s just a little end-of-the-month ritual. Why not make it optional? (If it is optional, why not make it clear that it is?)

What have we learned from these graphs?

• That whatever I was doing from the 20th to the 30th probably has the most to teach me about being productive. (More on this story later.)
• That targets are motivating, but being a long way away from them is apparently more motivating.
• That scrupulously recording your output pays dividends in fun statistical analysis – which is, after all, the only reason any of us ever do anything.

Lessons from Absurdity

Much as I enjoy National Novel Writing Month, I don’t for a moment think it offers a sustainable way to write or a means to get the best out of yourself. That’s not a criticism: it’s not intended to do either of those things. But that doesn’t mean it’s valuable only as a way to break out of a rut, or to force out a first draft of a project that’s been nagging at you. There are some useful lessons to be learned from this ridiculous way of writing. As much for my benefit as anyone else’s, I’m going to record the ones I come across here.

Chunking

You can call this “timeboxing” or “the Pomodoro technique” if you like, although strictly speaking those are both a little more complicated and at least one of them sounds kind of silly. It’s simply the habit of setting a small chunk of time and spending that time focused entirely on a single task. Ideally, you then repeat the process – otherwise you don’t get anything very substantial done.

The real magic here isn’t that you cut out distractions for the thirty minutes you spend concentrating: it’s that you let them back in afterwards. National Novel Writing Month has in-built distractions that this is particularly valuable for, wordcount being the most notable. Breaking up your work time gives you a nice routine to put these in: the timer runs out, and you check your wordcount, update it on the website and take a look at what that does to the graph. You don’t need willpower to keep yourself from doing that when you should be working, because it’s always on the horizon anyway.

Leave it, he’s not worth it

A classic writing tip is to avoid pausing for research. If you find you need to know when Mars bars were first produced, you don’t stop to look it up: you stick in an obvious and, ideally, searchable placeholder (popularly the journalist’s mark “TK”) and get on with business. It’s a particularly potent method when you’re in full flow or against a deadline, and it pairs very nicely with chunking your time because you can build filling in the blanks into your between-chunks routine.

Something I find comes less easy, but which is at least as beneficial, is skipping whole passages when you don’t feel you can be bothered with them. Why force them out? Will that be your best work, or would you do better moving on to something that suits your mood?

Bit by bit, I’ve been reducing my tolerance for passages that aren’t playing nicely, becoming more and more willing to drop in a little note-to-self and move on. Often, I find myself moving on to passages I set aside on a previous occasion, and which I suddenly have a much better idea of. Often, I find the scenes I write one after another are connected by something more interesting than just chronological order. It may be a cheap productivity trick, but it can naturally lead to more thoughtful writing.

Music

I used to write with music in the background all the time. No problem. At some point, I stopped because I thought it was distracting; whenever I tried it again, it really was distracting, which rather supported the theory. It was a shame, because music can have its advantages: it drowns out other distracting noise from the environment; it keeps you aware of the passage of time should you find yourself staring into space.

I suspect the real problem was that I started listening to the wrong music. Not in a way that makes sense – the old doctrine of sticking to music with no vocals, or vocals in a language I don’t understand, does nothing for me. REM seem to be the most reliable source of non-distracting music; “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” is inadvisable. (OK, perhaps that last part makes sense.)

If there’s a lesson here, I think it’s this: be wary of employing writing advice just because it sounds reasonable. It’s always better to do something silly that works than something sensible that doesn’t. That goes for life, too.

Needs title - something about making decisions?

The new techniques I’ve been using to keep myself organized have one key feature in common: if you allow something to occupy your attention, you make a decision about what to do with it.

This means if you read an email, you decide whether you need to keep it and whether it needs a reply, even if you choose not to reply straight away. If you pick a piece of paper off the floor, you either decide where it goes and put it there or you dump it in a dedicated ‘inbox’ until it’s time to pay attention to it. What you don’t do is pluck something from your inbox, look it over, and put it straight back in your inbox because you don’t feel like deciding what to do with it after all.

Once in this habit, I realized how ridiculous my habits were when looking over my drafts.

“Perhaps remove this.”

“‘But’ rather than ‘and’?”

“Is this clear?”

All these little notes-to-self really said just one thing: “I didn’t bother to actually think about this.” When the time came to turn those annotations into an actual change in my work, my workflow went:

1. Refamiliarise myself with the problem I was trying to solve.
2. Work out how to solve it.
3. Solve it.

when it should have gone:

1. Do what it says in the annotation.

So, from now on, a new rule for redrafting: every annotation must be actionable. Otherwise, I might as well write “Redraft this” on the front page and have done with it.

Why I'm going back to NaNoWriMo

A first in writer’s block

Were I the sort of person to believe that my experience is universal, I’d have one key piece of advice for aspiring young writers: do not do a literature degree.

The benefits of studying English seem obvious: as well as absorbing good style from the great writers, you gain the ability to pepper your work with the kind of allusions that make you look clever and the reader feel clever. You also gain the related but less respected power of being able to lift ideas and plots quickly and efficiently.

But you might also lose the ability to judge your own work effectively. The subset of writing which achieves publication is already a misleading one to compare yourself against, but at least it’s vaguely practical. Implicitly pitting yourself against the established canon of classic English literature is - in my non-transferable experience - a wonderful way to end up painfully producing a very small amount of pompous rubbish.

Smugness, admiration and fun

There are a number of different gains to be had from writing fiction. If we’re honest, most of us can ignore the financial ones, at least for the time being. Beyond those, there’s the pride you take in what you create, and the prestige you gain from creating something people admire. Maximising these gains means becoming a better writer, but it also means finding the right niche. You might be a very effective producer of romantic fantasy novels beloved by teenagers who think depression is a fashion accessory, and only a middling producer of political satire, but if you value political satire and the admiration of its fans more than you admire sexy werewolves, it may not be sensible to follow your talents. (One of the unfortunate effects of a literature degree can be to skew your values towards the Nobel-winning side of things, wherever your talents lie - and whether whether or not that is what you enjoy.)

Fun is another important consideration. If your values are as above but you really enjoy writing those fantasy novels, you’re going to have a difficult choice on your hands. (Unfortunately, when an English degree shifts your values it seems to leave your pleasures well alone.) You’re also going to struggle to be productive: you’re motivated to work on the satire but will have a lousy time when you do; the fantasy will be fun, but you won’t feel much better about life once you stop for the evening. You might as well watch telly instead of writing. (My advice in this situation would be to write a romantic fantasy novel thick with political satire, if only that didn’t sound so awful.)

I had hoped to provide a definitive formula with which to calculate how you can best maximise your total return from the time you spend writing under these diffifcult circumstances; sadly my PR company have not got back to me.

Fun is better than a new notebook

For me - and, I suspect, many others - there is one key consideration: writing anything will make me happier than writing nothing at all. This means that as long as it’s not obvious what I want to be writing it’s reasonable to pursue a strategy that maximizes output. And in my experience, that’s the one that makes writing fun. In that situation, starting might be less exciting but carrying on is easy, and carrying on is what gets you the vast majority of your sentences. In the worst case, the fun approach is no worse than watching television.

NaNoWriMo

Luckily, there’s a well-established way to force yourself back into fun, productive writing. National Novel Writing Month starts today, and I’m fairly confident it’s impossible to participate successfully unless you give yourself permission to have fun. The two years I took part were easily the most fun I’ve had writing. Some would say that’s because it encourages you not to take your writing too seriously; I don’t think that’s quite right. 50,000 words in a month is tough, but it’s not so tough that it’s worth it for bragging rights alone; if you don’t take the writing seriously, the only sensible thing is to give up. Rather, I think it encourages you not to take yourself too seriously. (Some people thrive on taking themselves seriously, and there’s nothing wrong with that; I am not among them.)

So, this November I’m going to do what comes naturally: being silly and letting myself have fun.

I still can’t stand the name, though.