My first Nano was 2004. I found out about Nano two weeks into November. I signed up, with no plan and 16 days to write 50,000 words. That meant I had to write 4,000 words a day.
All I had was an idea for a first scene - a young man, coming to his senses after a drinking binge, with no idea what happened while he was blacked out. I had a hangover that day, which might be why I found the idea interesting. Beyond that, I thought he would be implicated in a series of murders and have to investigate them to prove his innocence, only to discover that he is actually the killer. But it was all very vague.
I wrote furiously. Whatever I could think of, I crammed in there somehow. I introduced all sorts of characters who did all sorts of stuff. There was a lot of sex. Finally, I reached the point where Bob would discover that he was the killer. Only then did I realise there was a gaping hole in the heart of my murder-mystery - I'd forgotten to kill anyone.
Still, I learned a lot from that experience. First, I should kill people kill people, frequently, and worry about who did it and why later. Second, I could do this writing thing quite well. There are some scenes in that story which I still rate among the best things I've ever written. Also, I learned a lot of dirty tricks to help me write when I didn't know what I was going to write about. Not like having characters sit about singing "American Pie," or describing the plots of films they've seen. I mean stuff that actually helps you develop characters and conflicts, introduce new events and ideas into your story, or at least write entertaining diversions.
Second attempt at Nano saw me screw up in a different way. After 50,000 words, I'd killed someone but wasn't able to work out who did it. The problem was my narrator. I'd started off using a narrator based on myself. I discovered I was a boring person to write about, and the least likely person to solve a mystery. In the end I made another character punch my fictional alter ego, and simply introduced a new narrator - a gutsy, loud mouthed school girl. She was fun to write, but there were too many structural issues with the story. After after hitting 50,000 I put it to rest. Lesson learned from all this - do what you have to do. If you find your original idea sucks, find a way of abandoning it and moving onto a better one.
Third nano was my first attempt at hardboiled murder mystery - think Humphrey Bogart, 1920s, cool cars and tough guys, Prohibition. I had a rough idea, but as I wrote I found two plot lines developing. I wanted to knit them together but in the end they diverged too much. So I seperated them and re-wrote one into a full story in its own right. Hey presto! A rough draft of a not completely rubbish story, 62,044 words long.
The next year, 2007, I revisited the pulp genre and my long sufferring PI. I sent him down to Mississippi to investigate a killing there. My goal was to write 50,000 words in November, and then carry on until the damn thing was done - the year before I'd taken a few months off before completing the story. Mission accomplished! I wrote through November, December and into January, completing the rough draft. It was very far from perfect, but it wasn't disasterous. And at 89,238 words, it was the longest thing I'd ever written.
So it took me four attempts to get it anywhere near right. It isn't an instant process. Don't be disappointed if you make a mess of it the first time. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett described his work as a series of attempts to 'Fail better.' And he won the Nobel Prize for Literature with his failures. Keep trying, keep failing, fail better.
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