Isn't novel writing a marathon? So why do we sprint?

Literature & Writing NaNo and Similar
21

If this statement were true, then wouldn’t it follow that most really good, experienced, published writers would only need one attempt to write that good draft?

But many–not all, but many–of the really good, experienced, published writers who discuss their particular process, are very open about how they must iterate through multiple drafts, just like the folks on this thread.

This means the statement at the top of my post is false. If these really good writers could write it in one go, they would do so.

There are those special few who, nearly all the time, can write a perfect or near perfect first draft. However, if a writer has been writing for a number of years and has never written a perfect first draft, then it’s probably safe to say they will never do so, and it’s a self-defeating mistake for them to go on believing it’s possible. It’s not. If they could do it, they already would have.

(There are always exceptions. I’ve heard of writers who usually follow the multiple draft process, but then have that one story that just came out perfect the first time through.)

(Really good writers probably require less drafts to get it ‘perfect’ than a hack like me. And the level of ‘perfect’ they attain will be (far) higher than my level of ‘perfect’. But the principal remains the same: You write the story first to understand/discover what it’s about. Once you’ve got a beginning, middle, and end written, then you embark on an iterating cycle of improvements, and during this refinement cycle you will continue to discover and understand more and more about your story. Until you’re so farking tired of working on the thing that you pronounce it ‘perfect’ and move on.)

(So far in this thread, I think only myself and @SCN have mentioned plotting and outlining prior to starting a first draft. Maybe the rest of you are all a bunch of pantsers. :blush: I’m (usually) a (extreme) plotter. I’ve even outlined 3k short stories. Still, my feeling is that, regardless of the planning work that’s been done, until I get the first draft written, I don’t have anything. The outline is just the skeleton, and without flesh and muscle and all the other icky stuff, a skeleton can’t move. Although it can be useful at Halloween.)

Best,
Jim

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22

Why Nano and Similar has been so popular does not seem too mysterious. Presumably it is because a lot of people succeed at it – and successfully doing something feels good, especially if it something you’ve long thought you’d like to do. Probably many are excited because they end up writing something rather than nothing – or certainly writing a bunch that they wouldn’t have in that time.

The real question is why is it so successful for people – getting them to do the thing. It is true that getting to the goal in the time allowed really pushes people to not stop and natter at things, but this is only true once they have bought into the demand that the deadline sets. But what buys them it? Clearly, they could have privately declared their own goal and deadline – and perhaps many have – and that would not have worked.

In the end I think it is a crowd effect. They did not set the deadline – so there is no going back on it – and a whole crowd of people are doing it – you are not alone, but are doing it together. Sure, you could go and flashdance in the park any day, but you don’t. Change that to a flashmob dance and now you’ve got fun, now you’ve got a reason to do it today, not tomorrow.

So, as it seems to me, it’s popularity has little to do with whether this is a good way to go about writing a novel. And, moreover, its effectiveness in getting people to write has nothing at all to do with whether this is a good way to get started with a novel. In fact, it precisely looks like a framework for getting people to write text without building in any methodology for fiction writing at all – it is just kind of the only structure that such an event could have.

If you sit down and try to imagine how you could structure a writing event that would enable people very widely to succeed (and thus becomes popular) and by leveraging the crowd effect, it is hard to see how else you would do it. It can’t be too structured, because it can’t be like school; you can’t keep people on hook for very long; it has to be big enough to seem like a real accomplishment; and it has to be crazy intense (b/c madness makes camaraderie).

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23

I’ve done Nano a number of times. Sometimes I even got the coveted Win Certificate for 50k words.

Did I come out with a usable story on Dec. 1? No. Did I come out with something that could be edited into a usable story? … No.

What I produced each successful time was a character (or characters) and milieu that I knew very well indeed. Those later became the building blocks for the stories I published.

So. Is it novel writing? Not for me. Did I value it? Hell yeah. I’d never have explored those worlds and characters had I not done Nano. Will I do a Nano-like activity this November? You betcha.

P. S. I also came out with a few lifetime friends. Well worth it.

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24

all the data I’ve seen shows that if you don’t make those bad drafts, you won’t ever get the experience that lets you build up the ability to see the errors, much less correct them. In your second bad draft you can start to see some of the errors in the first. In the third, you get to see more of the errors in the second, and so on.

Same with drawing. You draw, you learn pencil control, you learn shading and shapes. Your first drawings will suck, and as you do more bad drawings and study them, you’ll learn to spot the errors, then you can practice doing better.

Same with music. Same with dance. Same with literally every creative field there is.

Talent is the work you didn’t see, the drafts and sketches and stumbles that never make it out of the practice space.

So yeah. Write that bad draft. Learn from it. Burn it if you must, but write it and learn and write more and learn more.

As for sprints, meh. I do like co-working and body doubling, and while the rest of the group is “sprinting” I’m just getting a bit of quiet focus time. It works for me.

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25

I think it is the aspect of “everybody has a story”. Will it be a publishable story? I doubt it.
What is the biggest hurdle for writing? Procrastination. Therefore, it gets people motivated and developing a habit of writing.
Personally, I have a number of writing projects on the go. But very few are finished and sometimes need a push to get cracking on putting pen to paper (figuratively).
So I see the benefit of “the 50,000 word push”. Because I’m lazy I’m not prepared to put in the effort or risk the exposure (I only want people to see my most polished work- which is a danger . What if they dont like it ? Or think it’s crap?) Still I see the benefit of it all.

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26

Ah, my dear, well-intentioned friends. You are of course correct. But that doesn’t make it good advice. Good advice is what people need to hear at that moment…

THE ORACLE
You already know what I'm going to tell you.

NEO
I'm not the One.

THE ORACLE
Sorry, kid.

You are confusing INTENTIONS with OUTCOMES.

Yes, you will write a lot of “bad” things and learn from them to get “good”. But unless you are TRYING to write “good” outputs, you will never learn. You can’t “not care about quality”, you will end up with terrible writing that makes you think you’re a terrible writer, get you no closer to something you are excited about, and make you want to quit. You have to try and write as well as you can, but be comfortable that it won’t be perfect.

The people who have success with the splurt-on-a-page approach have already written enough and consumed enough to have an instinctive feel for good language, character, plot, story and structure. They may tell you that they have switched off the internal editor, but they haven’t. What they produce is still “good”, and close. It’s not “great” yet (and “great” is what it takes), but it’s got all the magic ingredients to be able to see there the great will come from when reading it.

The advice should NEVER be “don’t worry about quality”. The actual good advice is: “Write as well as you can, but keep moving forward. Don’t slow down. Don’t go back. Get it finished THEN make it great.”

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27

While others have covered this, I’ll share what it means for me. I’m terrible at getting things finished. I have an unhealthy number of unfinished novels. Stories and prose are different things, and I very easily get bogged down in the latter, meaning stories never get finished.

Sprinting solves this for me (in part). By focusing on uninterupted chunks of time where the goal is to just get the ideas down, it has helped me complete far more things. While sprinting I do not go back and edit anything, even if this sometimes means writing partial scenes more than once as ideas change. Sometimes the enforced progression also shakes out new ideas. I find often the characters tell me more what they want to do, rather than what was planned (not that I ever planned in much detail). And this can be a curse in itself when comes around to editing…

Something I learned from spriting is to work in focused chunks of time, and for the last decade or so I’ve found myself using a Pomodoro approach for writing and editing. It helps keeps those distractions away if I work in 30 minute chunks, because there’s rarely anything that would suffer too much for a 30 minute delay while I finish my words.

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28

To go back to this question, I do agree that the marathon metaphor is a good one; I’ve used it myself when asked for advice (when people are silly enough to ask me).

My advice is start on smaller pieces and focus on form (Novel in a Day and Villa Diodati are great for that!), and then work your way up to longer runs, rather than jumping straight into writing long “bad” things.

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29

I never intentionally write bad things, but it’s certainly not good on the first attempt. I’m better than I used to be, but not good. It’s a rough, a model, a shape, but not how I pictured that in my mind. I usually “sprint” down scenes, and then promise myself there’s a rewrite later.

Has nobody posted Lamott yet? I’ll post her here. This, IMHO, should be required reading for anyone struggling with quality which I think we all do at times.

Those initial ideas are so fragile that trying to polish them early may kill them off prematurely. I’m in the midst of this now, adding a second POV and storyline to a matured WIP. The new stuff is… not great. But I have discovered details as I write, motivation of the character, and general backstory that I didn’t know when I started. This is the discovery draft, and it’s not all bad, but it’s not lovely. I’m putting 500-750 words a night into it so I can go back and polish the hell out of it… once I know what happens.

I have a plan, and a plot, and an outline, but it still needs to translate from my brain to the page/screen, and that is an imperfect, cluttered pathway. I sprint to find the landmarks, wade through the verbal silt to find the golden flecks, and will later lay them in a row.

Sprints get me there. “OK, fifteen minutes on the timer, no looking at my phone. Keep the hand moving forward. GO.”

Incidentally, thanks to a thread on “Collections” I’m keeping this new POV work together in the view so I can focus on this narrative, which is physically woven among the other more refined work. I love the added focus of the Collection and not getting bogged in comparing that stuff to this stuff.

Polish later. Write now.

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30

Yes, this. This is how the advice should be framed for people who take this approach.

31

This, not so much. Stop encouraging people to go for “shitty”!

“Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.”

Absolute nonsense. Speak for yourself, Anne.

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I’m not. It’s encouraging people to be OK with shitty because you will make it better, later. If you’ve not read the essay, I encourage it. If you’ve read it, I encourage a re-read.

All creative work has a “rough” stage, usually done in private. Don’t preempt the flow by trying to polish every word as it leaves the pen. Give yourself permission to write dreck, knowing that if you keep going, quality will come.

My first drafts are an embarrassment as standalone work. Yours may be delights.

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33

We’re perhaps getting a bit far afield from the original question about what value someone sees in word sprints.

But, since Anne Lamott’s been introduced to the conversation, I’ll throw in Ira Glass’s “The Gap” approach to the discussion.

Here’s a video that This American Life has linked to. It’s made by someone else, but the audio track is Glass.

There’s also this link with a similar video and the transcript of Glass.

The idea of giving yourself permission to make mistakes and learn from them is important. It’s been critical to my writing, my woodworking, and guitar playing.

Even playing video games is a lot of trying something, failing, and then trying something else until I figure out what will work.

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34

True, sorry for running down a first-drafts rabbithole.

I will say that if you are inclined towards sprints, or other deadline-motivated writing, the “target wordcount” view is really handy. I used it late in another process to help me reduce overall count by 10% but it could and can be a quick-glance view for “I can’t stop until I have 500/750/1667/2000 words.” The dopamine hit of that little bar moving is undeniable.

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35

My apologies, I was directing that at Anne (somewhat clumsily. Sorry.

Examples of my first drafts are available in the early various NiaDs I took part in and the two Villa Diodatis. They’re not great (I wouldn’t expect to be able to sell them) and would certainly would be improved with a second pass (sadly I don’t have the luxury of time while also running those events), but no I’m certainly not embarrassed by them.

36

Back in the days I never understood NaNo sprints. It seemed like WriMos were simply boasting about how much quicker they could write than others. I wasn’t into those games.

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37

As the challenge was always “quantity over quality” it did make a sort of manic sense to squeeze as much output into a limited time as possible. The output was never going to be great, but it made raw material to edit. I think someone cited the “1000 pots” analogy. Make a bunch of words, and it’s hard not to improve.

Sprints are the excuse to make a bunch of words in the 30 minutes life may grant you. (See also: the pomodoro method.)

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