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A Middling Problem
Monday, December 23rd, 2024 08:14 pmThere are many problems with NaNo, some of which I've rambled about here. But I'm realizing there's another one, and it's fundamentally baked into the structure of NaNo itself:
It gets you halfway, then stops.
Many writers bog down halfway through a book, so many that phrases like "the miserable middle" are common vernacular in writing circles. It makes sense: you're past the fun part at the beginning where you get to meet the main characters and screw up their lives, throw in cool stuff just because it's cool with the assurance that you'll do something with it later, and perhaps lose sight of what you've learned from every other book you've written, which is that this exciting vision in your head has a hell of a lot of work attached to it. But you haven't yet got inertia on your side, where the weight of all that clever stuff you've built up keeps that rock rolling downhill and your job as a writer is to keep running just ahead of it, where you get to cackle with evil glee as all that set-up starts to pay off. The middle is where you have to slog through making sure that all those threads keep pointing in the right direction to tie up later*, where the foreshadowing seems obvious and the reader can just figure it out for themselves from here (it's not and they can't), where you start to wonder if you can pull off that clever dovetailing of two disparate tracks (you can), and where the sheer amount of heavy lifting yet to be done is an inescapable cliff face in your path, not yet counterbalanced by all the heavy lifting you've done so far. Middles are where the fire of ambition tends to peter out and the fire of accomplishment hasn't yet been lit. It doesn't work that way for all writers, of course, but it's pretty common.
50,000 words is, approximately depending on genre and so forth, the middle of a novel.
So NaNo gets you going with a framework that prioritizes writing, encourages a breakneck pace, and (if you're lucky) has a supportive community to help you keep at it. You barrel along, not always happily but at least productively, with that 50K target in mind and the promise that you can *rest* when you get there. And you get to your 50K, and you cheer "Yay! I can stop now!"
And you stop. Right at the worst possible point.
Post-NaNo, you sleep, you catch up on the housework/reading/friends/whatever that you put off for a month, and, if you're like me anyway, drop that book like a very hot rock. And all of that support structure drops you, too. And then days or weeks or hopefully not months later, you try to pick the book up again, and discover that you are mired in the Slough of Despond with no momentum whatsoever, the beginnings of forgetfulness about what you were going to do next (you remember it was clever, but not exactly how), and as much hard work ahead to slog through as you have accomplishment behind. And most if not all of that encouraging framework has disappeared, because everybody else is exhausted from November, too.
This is a major failure point, and it's baked into what NaNo is.
I'm thinking there needs to be an alternative. I do like the rush of NaNo; that ridiculous challenge is very motivating for me, in the years I choose to accept it. But it's also not sustainable at that level. Is there a lesser challenge that would still be invigorating, but that could be kept up until a book is actually *finished*, say in four months instead of one? That would carry the writer through the miserable middle and out the other side, without having to abandon all of real life for longer than most of us realistically can? Something with the framework and the *participation* that made NaNo at its heyday effective? (Not through the official NaNo organization, which is all kinds of broken. But something more than just me setting a deadline for myself, which can sometimes work but is not what I'm looking for here.)
And most of all, something that doesn't stop right at the point where it's hardest to get going again.
*For the current book, this is also where I start having to do more front-brain planning to make sure things happen in the right order, both for practicality and for pacing. This is not the fun part.
It gets you halfway, then stops.
Many writers bog down halfway through a book, so many that phrases like "the miserable middle" are common vernacular in writing circles. It makes sense: you're past the fun part at the beginning where you get to meet the main characters and screw up their lives, throw in cool stuff just because it's cool with the assurance that you'll do something with it later, and perhaps lose sight of what you've learned from every other book you've written, which is that this exciting vision in your head has a hell of a lot of work attached to it. But you haven't yet got inertia on your side, where the weight of all that clever stuff you've built up keeps that rock rolling downhill and your job as a writer is to keep running just ahead of it, where you get to cackle with evil glee as all that set-up starts to pay off. The middle is where you have to slog through making sure that all those threads keep pointing in the right direction to tie up later*, where the foreshadowing seems obvious and the reader can just figure it out for themselves from here (it's not and they can't), where you start to wonder if you can pull off that clever dovetailing of two disparate tracks (you can), and where the sheer amount of heavy lifting yet to be done is an inescapable cliff face in your path, not yet counterbalanced by all the heavy lifting you've done so far. Middles are where the fire of ambition tends to peter out and the fire of accomplishment hasn't yet been lit. It doesn't work that way for all writers, of course, but it's pretty common.
50,000 words is, approximately depending on genre and so forth, the middle of a novel.
So NaNo gets you going with a framework that prioritizes writing, encourages a breakneck pace, and (if you're lucky) has a supportive community to help you keep at it. You barrel along, not always happily but at least productively, with that 50K target in mind and the promise that you can *rest* when you get there. And you get to your 50K, and you cheer "Yay! I can stop now!"
And you stop. Right at the worst possible point.
Post-NaNo, you sleep, you catch up on the housework/reading/friends/whatever that you put off for a month, and, if you're like me anyway, drop that book like a very hot rock. And all of that support structure drops you, too. And then days or weeks or hopefully not months later, you try to pick the book up again, and discover that you are mired in the Slough of Despond with no momentum whatsoever, the beginnings of forgetfulness about what you were going to do next (you remember it was clever, but not exactly how), and as much hard work ahead to slog through as you have accomplishment behind. And most if not all of that encouraging framework has disappeared, because everybody else is exhausted from November, too.
This is a major failure point, and it's baked into what NaNo is.
I'm thinking there needs to be an alternative. I do like the rush of NaNo; that ridiculous challenge is very motivating for me, in the years I choose to accept it. But it's also not sustainable at that level. Is there a lesser challenge that would still be invigorating, but that could be kept up until a book is actually *finished*, say in four months instead of one? That would carry the writer through the miserable middle and out the other side, without having to abandon all of real life for longer than most of us realistically can? Something with the framework and the *participation* that made NaNo at its heyday effective? (Not through the official NaNo organization, which is all kinds of broken. But something more than just me setting a deadline for myself, which can sometimes work but is not what I'm looking for here.)
And most of all, something that doesn't stop right at the point where it's hardest to get going again.
*For the current book, this is also where I start having to do more front-brain planning to make sure things happen in the right order, both for practicality and for pacing. This is not the fun part.
