When we spoke to NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty about the project, he mentioned that 27 novels composed during NaNoWriMo have been published in print. James Strickland’s first published novel was his NaNoWriMo cyberpunk novel Looking Glass, which he followed up this year with Irreconcilable Differences. Simon Haynes (who answered questions via email) also published his NaNoWriMo novel Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch, the fourth installment of his Hal Spacejock series. We spoke with both authors about how they approach novel-writing, their experiences with NaNoWriMo, and their advice for aspiring novelists who find themselves in a creative jam.

What made you decide to participate in NaNoWriMo and try to write a novel in this way?

James Strickland: Well this is actually, I think, the sixth time I’ve done it, I’d have to check. But I did 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006. So it’d actually be the fifth time. And actually, what happened was in 2002, I’d been playing online role playing games a lot typing a lot, and I finally reached a point where I was starting to pull back from that. And I wanted to create some characters and had some interesting things that directly involved a role playing game. Plus, you know, I had a degree in writing and it always annoyed me that it had never actually earned me a dime. So I signed up for NaNoWriMo as soon as I heard about it and gave me a shot.

Simon Haynes: Initially it was the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. I'm a procrastinator, and even with a publishing contract under my belt and a publisher keen for more of my novels, I still find it hard to settle down to write. This is because I'd rather settle down and tinker with all my software programs.

Initially it was the challenge of writing 50,000 words in a month. I'm a procrastinator, and even with a publishing contract under my belt and a publisher keen for more of my novels, I still find it hard to settle down to write. This is because I'd rather settle down and tinker with all my software programs.

Do you go into NaNoWriMo with any sort of set plan or do you tend to go in cold?

James Strickland: No, I’m one of those writers who jumped in cold, basically starts writing and gets the narrator – I write in the first person almost exclusively – so I jump in get the narrator to talk to me. Normally for NaNo I wait until about a week in and I start writing an aimless roadmap of where I want the plot to go so I don’t get myself into corners. But no, normally I start with a blank page and somebody talking to me.

Is it easier for you to work with that deadline?

James Strickland: Yeah, it’s easier to bash the content out. Now, whether you’re going to get good content out is another matter. The NaNo novel that I’ve published took about another four or five months of work to polish it up and make it really sellable, because you know, it’s only half the length of a normal novel when you come out of NaNo, and there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s just…you’re in a hurry.

But do you come out with a better sense of where the story is going?

James Strickland: Yeah, as a first draft it’s great. It gives, at least for me, by the time I’m done with the NaNo novel, I’ve met all or most of my characters, have a general idea of the plot, a general idea of the emotional ebb and flow of the story, and it also nails down the world a great deal for me.

(To Simon Haynes) Your published NaNoWriMo novel features Hal Spacejock, a character from your previous books. Did you find that having that deadline changed the way you wrote about him? Did it change his world in any way? Was it more difficult to write a Hal Spacejock book with a 30-day deadline?

Simon Haynes: I'd say it's easier to get started, because I don't have to worry about the first chapter or so. My plot outline for chapters one and two can usually be described as 'Hal or Clunk makes a trivial mistake, with huge consequences' Then I spent the rest of the book torturing them with the consequences.

However, each Hal Spacejock novel is about 2/3 Hal and Clunk, and 1/3 someone else entirely. That someone else might be the antagonist who is trying to achieve some plan of their own, which inevitable leads to their crossing swords with our hero, or sometimes the other 1/3 of the book is written from the POV of another character with a major problem.

I believe that's what keeps the Hal books fresh. It's not just Hal-Hal-Hal…sometimes he's just background material for the real plot.

How long was the process from finishing the NaNoWriMo draft to publication?

Simon Haynes: Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch (released in June this year) was the first novel based on my NanoWrimo efforts. My novels evolve as I write them, so I can't point to Hal 4 and say 'I remember writing that section during November 2006' because it's likely only traces of DNA remain. I can say that I wrote and edited the novel between November 2006 and October 2007. (Yes, I handed it in last year and three days later I started on NanoWrimo again!)

Do you find that you get stuck while writing?

James Strickland: All the time. And I got a piece of advice from a panel that Connie Willis did once where she said, “Torture your characters.” If you find that you’re having a hard time going forward with a plot, torture the characters some more. Random bad things can always happen.

In my first novel, Looking Glass, I got stuck because I sent the character to California to resolve the story. She got there about halfway through the NaNo draft. If she got there and started resolving…first of all, I had no way to connect her to the plot there yet. I mean, she knew what was there, but she didn’t have any contacts there. And I also would have resolved the story in about the third week of November, which would have been way too soon, with too few words. So I had the nemesis of the thing, which she actually isn’t completely aware of yet, basically steal her identity. So it stole her identity when she’s on the train to California. So when she gets there and tries to use her credit cards, she gets arrested.

And that precipitated a whole other change in the story, because the only person she knew well enough in California to bail her out of jail was a character who didn’t even have a name. I mean, he was in the story from the beginning, but he didn’t have a name. He was just so-and-so’s boyfriend. But he’s the only person she knows who isn’t directly connected to the company that she’s trying to investigate/fight against. So she calls him, and they talk, and next thing I know they’re going to bed together. And I’m like, “Wait! Wait! What are you guys doing?” I mean, this is the kind of thing you get when you take every opportunity to twist the knife on your characters. I don’t like it much, but they do interesting things.

Simon Haynes: If I get stuck on a scene (or more likely, can't be bothered writing it) I just leave it blank and add a short description stating what the scene is supposed to cover. I use yWriter [a freeware novel writing tool which Haynes created] to manage my novels, which makes it much easier to skip ahead, backwards and sideways without losing sight of the whole.

Sometimes, if my manuscript is already 85000-95000 words, I never do end up writing those missing scenes. I just start the next one with 'After ...' followed by a brief description of the events. After all, if I can't drum up enough enthusiasm to write the scene, how interesting would it really be for the reader?

Do you always write in the science fiction genre? What do you particularly like about writing in the genre?

James Strickland: Always science fiction. Almost everything I’ve ever written, even going back to high school, I wrote science fiction.

What it lets you do is it lets you amplify things about modern societies that are otherwise hard to see. You can project the technology into the future and its effect on society. And you can then see that in sharp relief and you can play with it. The novel that I’m working on right now that isn’t part of NaNo, it’s the one I was working on before I started NaNo this year, you don’t really ever think too much about time, because we all go through time at the same speed: one second per second. But if you are dealing with a story with a time dilation, you travel through space and it’s a month for you and a hundred years around you, it changes your relationship with the people who you left behind and it changes your relationship with the society and it changes your relationship with technology. It affects a lot of things without that technological MacGuffin, if you like, of near light speed travel and time dilation. You don’t see it you don’t get a sharp relief of it, and writing science fiction let’s you do that.

Simon Haynes: I like to explore different genres within each novel, keeping them all within the future populated galaxy I've gradually outlined in the books.

For example, Hal 1 was a buddy movie book, with a fair bit of undergraduate humour. Hal 2 involved alien technology and immigration woes, Hal 3 was secret agents and conspiracies, and Hal 4 was equal parts (deep breath) police work, romance, horror, mystery and revenge. (I wasn't sure whether it was going to be the last one, so I really loaded 'er up.)

Is science fiction conducive to NaNoWriMo? Is it especially helpful for science fiction writers?

Simon Haynes: I think it can make things a little more difficult, because you have to invent an entire world, or galaxy, before you can write about it. Transport systems, communications, computers, etc, etc. You can't just write SF in a vacuum. (Hah!)

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? What are you working on?

James Strickland: Yes. I’m working on a novel. It’s another science fiction novel. Almost everything I have published is cyberpunk, so it’s another cyberpunk novel. It’s set in the same world as my other two published novels. And as far as I can tell – I’m still figuring it’s out – it’s about a guy who works for the police in a fairly oppressive religious nation, where it’s a serious surveillance society. And he winds up with a case that someone’s thrown this light plane into a building and it’s his job to find out why and who. And as he starts digging then, of course, you run into – oh, here’s this huge conspiracy that is trying to cover up everything that’s involved with it. And they’re part of the government, but they’re at war with – I don’t know if you’ve read about this Anonymous that’s going after the Church of Scientology? This conspiracy organization is, in turn, having a war waged on them by an organization like that, except it’s not non-violent. So I went into the plot with the idea of I’d really like to see how this stand-alone complex would do against a classic Illuminati. But that’s the level I have the plot on. I didn’t know the characters until I started writing and I didn’t know how the plot was going to express. Now I’m starting to get a better idea.

Simon Haynes: Yes, I'm in there typing away. This time I'm writing Hal Spacejock book 5, which my publisher wants to release in November 2009. I'm hoping to get half the novel done this month (in a very basic first draft kind of way), and then finish it off over Jan-Mar next year.

So, would you recommend this process to others?

James Strickland: Yeah, I would recommend it a lot to people who say, “I want to write a novel someday.” It’s like, “Well, how does November strike you?” I would recommend it to people it like that. I would recommend it to people who are again caught editing a book forever. Do NaNo. Start over start a brand new book. Get your confidence back, because you really don’t have to sit, micromanage, edit. And one of the things I learned in writing class is that you don’t want to edit while you’re in the middle of creation, because you don’t want to stifle the creativity.

What advice would you give to folks who are stuck right now?

James Strickland: Torture the character. Find something bad that’s going to happen to them in the current circumstance and let them react to it. And that will usually get you going again. It may take the novel in places you didn’t plan, but if you have a roadmap you can then take it in a new direction that’s useful to you. But torture the characters. Any opportunity for bad things to happen with these people – killing them makes your story kind of short – is fine.

Simon Haynes: Easy. Write in 500 word chunks, one per hour. Don't sit down thinking 'I have to write 1800 words today to catch up', just sit and write 500 words. 15, 20, 30 minutes later, take the rest of the hour off. Then do another 500 words.

This year I'm trying to do 4 x 500 word chunks a day, which is three chunks for my word count and one extra for luck. I'm several thousand words ahead of my goal, and I don't feel like I've really sat down and written hard all month.

For more information on James Strickland and his novels, visit JamesRStrickland.com. For more information about Simon Haynes, yWriter, or Hal Spacejock, visit HalSpacejock.com.au.

Baty, who also wrote the novel-writing guide No Plot? No Problem!, started National Novel Writing Month in 1999. Each November, participants attempt to write 50,000 words of an entirely new novel, with little or no planning. Sound impossible? We caught up with Baty, who explained how impossible deadlines can inspire surprising works of fiction.

What got you started on turning this whole thing into this whole national movement? It’s becoming really huge.

It wasn’t at first. It was really never supposed to be national. In fact, the first year that I did it, it was just a bunch of us in the Bay Area in 1999. And the name “National Novel Writing Month” was sort of an inside joke that I think made us feel better about our sort of dismal chances of success. It was nice to kind of have a big-sounding name for what I was pretty sure was going to a pretty small thing.

So I think the idea kind of came from my past both working as an editor and putting out a ‘zine that I had done from the time I was about 22 years old until I was 27 or so. And it just seemed that when you give someone an impossible deadline, miracles happen, and things that you shouldn’t be able to pull off you can if the deadline is scary enough. And I think that was sort of the idea that drove this notion of writing a novel in a month – was you know, writing a novel seems like an impossible thing, so let’s give it a deadline and maybe that will make it doable. And strangely that’s kind of what happened. It really did.

There were 21 of us that first year and the books that we ended up writing were not great, but they weren’t abysmally, embarrassingly horrible. And to me, that felt like this tremendous accomplishment and I thought if we can do this, anyone can do this. So I put up a better website and extended the call a little bit wider the following year and it’s just grown from word of mouth from there.

It’s funny. I’ve talked to a lot of people online who say “Don’t talk to me. It’s November and I’m writing my novel.”

I feel like we owe a great apology to the blog readers of the world because I think that a lot of the great blogs are affected by this NaNoWriMo virus where all of the bloggers are sort of taken out of commission for the month of November.

And beyond people finishing the 50,000 words – which I think is amazing – you’ve had a lot of people get their novels published.

Yeah and it’s been interesting over the years to see the number of people who have ended up selling their NaNoWriMo manuscripts grow, because I never thought that would happen. It was really just supposed to be a creative kick in the pants, an adventuresome month spent running naked through your imagination. But it’s fantastic. It’s actually a pretty great way to get a book written. I mean you have to write the first draft in a month and then you go and spend probably the rest of the year actually revising it and expanding it, because, you know, 50,000 words is not really a classic literary length. You tend to preferably end up adding anywhere between 30 and 100,000 words on top of it. But yeah, more and more people have been finding publishers. I think we have 27 people so far have sold their manuscript to print publishers, and another probably three times that many have sold them to ebook publishers. And last year we had our first New York Times number one bestseller in Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. And it’s amazing. I mean, I go to airport bookstores and there’s Water for Elephants and it’s a NaNoWriMo novel. It’s pretty cool.

I was talking to someone whose first published novel was a NaNoWriMo novel, and felt he really needed that experience.

That’s kind of the interesting thing about NaNoWriMo as it’s grown. I think there’s definitely a large group of people who just do it for the sake of doing it, because it’s outrageous amounts of fun, because it pokes your imagination in really nice ways. I think because it also improves your reading ability in this really interesting way where once you’ve actually written a book you read on a completely different level. You are able to see both the really exquisite but you’re also able to see the seams of the book that couldn’t see before and that’s really fascinating. But there are, I would say at this point, 20 percent of us participants taking part in National Novel Writing Month really as part of this multi-stage process of getting that thing sold. And it works really well and we’ve had more and more published novelists come and take part in this just because you know everybody needs that deadline. And the really nice thing is that we’ve paired that terrifying deadline with a really supportive, fun, funny community that absolutely takes this goal of 50,000 words very seriously but does not take themselves so seriously as a lot of writing sites do, that it’s okay to have fun, it’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to learn by doing. And I think that is such a great atmosphere both for book lovers who are giving this a shot for the first time as well as book writers who do this for a living.

Do you have any sense of what genres are the most common for NaNoWriMo?

It’s pretty evenly spread out. I think our top genres are fantasy, science fiction, and literary fiction, however you define that, and romance is also a big one. And in terms of science fiction, there’s always been a huge contingent of scifi writers that have done NaNoWriMo and they were really some of the earliest adopters. I think because the science fiction reading community has already had so many great online resources so they were already in some ways gathered together on message boards and websites and blogs. And so the NaNoWriMo virus that I talked about earlier was really able to take hold because these are connected people already and so the word can really go out. When one person’s doing it, there’s “Oh, maybe we should all do this.” And I think that’s been one of the reasons that we have had such a high turnout among the science fiction writers and fans.

With science fiction writers, there’s often a lot of additional work going on: worldbuilding, creating new technology. Do you find that NaNoWriMo helps with that, or is it a hindrance to writing the novel?

Yeah, that’s a good question and you’re right. It’s interesting. I think certain genres lend themselves a little bit better to NaNoWriMo than others. Like mysteries are really – if you don’t know whodunit when you’re writing it, you’re kind of in trouble as a mystery writer. And I think science fiction writers – there’s worldbuilding – they do have a little more work to do. But I think the nice thing about NaNoWriMo for worldbuilders is it’s so easy to get bogged down in this sense of “I really need to understand the mechanics of spaceflight for this particular craft before I’m able to move forward in my story.” And I think that you can spend your entire life basically trying to populate these worlds and try to understand how the various technologies interact, how the various organisms, and all that stuff and at a certain point it just becomes an impediment to actually writing your book rather than something that enhances your ability to write.

And I think that NaNoWriMo is good for science fiction writers in that sense that it’s kind of like “Okay, enough planning. It’s time to take this show on the road and actually get your story written.” And I think that’s also true for writing historical fiction. They get caught in that same infinite research loop where you really can take a century to try to map out the exact kind of wunderbust that your character would be carrying or whether the buttons on their pants would be made of elephant tusk or brass. And I think in some ways that sort of hides the point of the story. You don’t necessarily need to know how that creature breathes or something.

It sounds like a lot of people use research as a procrastination tool, or an excuse not to write the novel.

For me, what I have found is that it’s better to just go ahead and write the thing, and get the plot down and get your character arcs going, and figure out who’s going to be in the story, and get a general sense of where it’s going to be set, and know that a novel is something that goes through drafts. There’s really no way of getting around it. No matter how talented you are as a writer, you cannot get your novel right on the first draft. You just can’t do it. It’s too complicated. And so I think with that in mind, I would encourage people to go ahead and write the story with whatever worlds they can get open at the time. And then go through and see what parts of the story are the best parts. And then on your second draft build your book around those. And who knows? Maybe a lot of that intricate world and entire solar system that you would have spent a year creating, maybe it turns out it’s not even a hit in that book. So at that point, it would have been a lot of wasted time.

One of the things I really like about NaNoWriMo is this community you’ve set up. You have these block captains who keep everyone in line. And there’s this wonderful sense of – and I mean this in the best way possible – sense of shame in the community, shaming you to keep writing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re really in some ways kind of a cross between a marathon and a literary block party or something where having that community is really important. And I think it does such great things for both the writing and the writer in that none of us are getting paid to write these novels and because of that it can be really hard to make time for them. There’s so many things that take precedence in our lives, things that pay the rent and the mortgages, and things that allow us to send our kids to school and all that stuff. Novels tend to be very far down on the list of crucial life undertakings and because of that I think you need to you need anything that helps force you to sit down when you are not feeling it I think is absolutely crucial in getting the book written. And I think this aspect of word count and then this community of people who are going to ask you about, well, how are you doing? Are you at 35,000 words? And you have 13,000 words.

And I think that does help you keep your feet to the fire and kind of gives you the motivation that you need to struggle through the ups and downs of a first draft. And it can be really challenging even for professional novelists that have done this a lot and know there is always light at the end of the tunnel if you just keep on writing. And there are just dispiriting, demoralizing moments where you just think, “What the hell am I doing? I’m a horrible writer. This is the worst story I’ve ever come up with. I should just bury this thing in the back yard and be done with it.” But you find if you keep going through those periods that actually things get better and stories start to come alive and characters take the book in unexpected directions and it all works out. But if don’t have a group of people to help push you through those tough times, it’s just very, very easy to quit. And for that reason, I think this idea of having local chapters all around the world where you can actually bring your laptop or a legal pad or whatever and sit in a coffee shop with folks that you may or may not know and just write your novel I think is just such an essential productivity tool for amateur novelists.

Do you find then that there’s a lot of cross-pollination among the genres? Does physical presence matter more than a close alignment in what you’re writing?

Yeah, that is kind of a nice thing about it. And another nice thing about it is that a lot of people have been doing this every November for six, seven, eight, nine years. And at a certain point people who maybe started out as a scifi writer, after they’ve written four scifi novels and November’s coming up again and they definitely want to do it again, I think it kind of helps push you outside of the typical genre that you might normally read and explore some other things. I know for me, I started writing Nick Hornby-esque music nerd with relationship problems-style fiction and you can only write so many of those before you start wondering what else is out there. And I’ve written a couple of young adult novels that I’ve really enjoyed and I wrote an aquatic zombie lawyer novel. You just kind of get curious and I think that’s a great thing to explore the outer reaches of your imagination.

Um, is that aquatic zombie lawyer novel available somewhere?

It’s available only on my hard drive to a very select readership.

What would you say to NaNoWriMo writers who are now several days into the month, and the high has worn off, and now they’re stuck?

I would just say that this is part of it. This is a time when this idea that seemed kind of fun and a little bit silly is going to start feeling like work and a lot of this self-doubt about our abilities as writers are going to creep in about now. And it’s also a time when a lot of cool, just crazy things start to happen in peoples’ lives, like this is when hard drives start exploding and people get hit by cars. It really is a strange anti-vortex that perhaps is channeled by NaNoWriMo. But a lot of crazy things happen in peoples’ lives that make focusing on your book tough. So I would just say just keep going and know that it will get better in week three and that if you keep going into week four that it just feels like the greatest thing you could ever imagine. It’s just really an exhilarating feeling.

Did you deliberately choose the worst possible month to do this?

You know, the first year we did it, we did it in July. And it was tough for other reasons, because everyone was on vacation. And so we would have done it the next July though, but it turned out that the original group wasn’t available. People were just too busy. So we moved it to November. And I think that it’s nice in some ways because a lot of the world is having really miserable weather. Also, November starts with N-O-V, which is kind of a mnemonic to help you think about “Oh, it’s November! I should be thinking nov-el.” And I think that’s a kind of psychic aid. And then, it’s also an absolutely miserable month for any student or teacher. It’s a really hectic time. But it’s easier to get something done when you’re incredibly busy. When you’ve got a million things to do, adding number million-and-one is somehow more doable than when you don’t really have stuff to do and then somehow it’s hard to get anything done. So it’s a horrible month, but there aren’t really any good months, so I think this one’s pretty okay…

What’s interesting is there are a lot of high school students that do NaNoWriMo – a lot of high school students. And I was never more sleep-deprived and exhausted than I was in high school. You have to get up at some ungodly hour and you just have way too many things going on. And that to me is so inspiring that this large of group of teens are basically like, “I’m going to do this. I’m writing my novel.” And I think it’s just great.

So what are you working on this month?

I’m back to square one, but now it’s thirty-something music nerd with relationship problems. So I’ve grown a lot in the last ten years.

Top image courtesy of NaNoWriMo.

[National Novel Writing Month]