At the time of writing, my NaNoWriMo effort stands at 38500 words. So I’m in with a chance even though my plan fell apart like a wet pizza sometime into the second week. I almost walked away from it then. But I’m too stubborn for that even though I had to take a few days out for deadlines. So when I returned to it, with wordcount to make up and no decent plan in place, panic seized me every time I looked at my keyboard. It was time for a new approach. It was time to go meta.

Someone overheard my description of this MetaWriMo trick in a writing workshop this week and jumped to the conclusion that I’m an utterly pretentious wanker. I could see it in her face. Oh well, I have no pride left anyway.

In fact going meta involves merely pretending that you’re an utterly pretentious wanker. You need to tell yourself that suddenly your NaNoWriMo novel has become a postmodern story about the writing of a novel. But wait! It’s just a trick, because you’ll strip out the meta-wankiness when you come to the edit. It’s really just a way of bringing your planning and discovery work into the novel so it can be used as legitimate wordcount.

So here are some MetaWriMo tricks I tried this time round:

1. Take the plunge and redefine your novel

This is the first step, and you really just take it in your head. You know what your novel’s about, right? It’s about a band of experimentally intelligent lab squirrels on quest to find a mythical Golden Nut, is it not? Or a campus feud at Reading University in 1973. Right? Wrong. Whatever your book was about, it’s now about the process of writing a NaNoWriMo novel. This mental twist is your essential first step into the world of MetaWriMo. Once you’ve accepted this, everything else becomes possible. Does this mean you’re abandoning your real novel? Absolutely not. But the process of defining that novel is interesting too. What’s more, it’s useful. You’ll be using your NaNoWriMo novel to learn more about your story, your world, your characters. You’ll learn what works, and what doesn’t. You’ll have the freedom to take risks, and to back up and take them all over again. You’re accepting that writing a novel top to tail isn’t for you, and you’re creating a portfolio you’ll use for your next draft. What’s more, you can’t fail. After all it’s all wordcount.

2. Create a meta-narrator

Your meta narrator exists really to make you feel better about using the NaNoWriMo process for planning and for free writing as well as writing the novel proper. Your meta narrator is your fig leaf and your master of ceremonies.

The meta narrator is a framing device you can use to thread all your story discovery work together so that when it comes time to submit your novel on 30 November, you can say yes, this is a novel. It’s an experimental novel, but a novel nonetheless. The narrator story-izes what might otherwise feel like a collection of notes and exercises.

He’s not necessary to the process, but he’s fun, and you can have him muse about story options, so he can end up making discoveries for you during the writing process.
Have fun with the meta-narrator. You’ll be stripping him out in the rewrite, so you can go crazy. Make him a computer intelligence from the year 2372, or a magic imp.

3. Go meta

Now you can do anything you like, really. The aim is to find out who your characters are, to explore your setting, and to discover where your story is heading. Here are some things I had my meta-narrator introduce when the going got sticky:

a. Write some back story

How did we get here? Trace a scene back into your novel’s pre-history.

b. Interview your characters

There are character interviews all over the internet. There’s a good one right here, too. How many of your NaNoWriMo characters are two dimensional? Story is driven by character, so back up and explore some of your novel’s walk-on parts. Maybe they’ll end up being more important than you thought.

c. Rewrite a scene

Did you hurry through a good bit? Try rewriting it from the top. Think back for likely scenes, and add them to your writing list. Favour scenes in which more detail might add depth, and yield more story branches.

d. Write mutually exclusive scenes

Not sure which way the story should twist at a key point? Have your cake and eat it. Try both. Maybe a character gets killed in one scene. In another version she escapes, and has all  sorts of adventures. This is post-modernism. Go and read Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams. You see? Actual real, good, proper novelists do this stuff.

e. Go into what-if mode

Make a list of potential scenes. Don’t think about it too much. Get as many ideas down as you can. Let each idea spark others. Have your meta narrator narrow the field down a bit afterwards. Refer back to this passage when you’re stuck for something to write.

f. Go into setting mode

Rewrite a scene in setting only. Describe buildings, and objects, but nothing else. When the edit comes you’ll be able to bring your layers together. Do the same with smells and sounds. Write scenes in gesture only. If you start to feel guilty about this, have your wanky meta-narrator say something profound and post-modern to justify it.

g. Change the point of view

Write from the point of view of your antagonist. Or rewrite a scene from the perspective of a minor character.

h. When all else fails, skip ahead and write the best bits

There’s something cool about your story, right? There have to be some scenes you’re looking forward to writing. Don’t wait. Write one now. You can shuffle things around later. If you’ve written all the exciting scenes then try section e (above) again, and sketch in some new ones. And remember, you probably rattled through the cool stuff too fast first time round, so don’t be afraid to try them out again.

The NaNo pep talks from OLL central and my local Municipal Liaison keep on arriving in my inbox. I have to say I prefer the local version; my ML was only a thousand words ahead of me at the last count, which is always cheering to read. (Believe me, I read and re-read emails that cheer.)

Confession of the week: We’re past the half-way point, and I haven’t reached five figures yet. Shhh!

I should point out that I haven’t really been giving NaNoWriMo my all, and will probably continue to not do so even unto the final week. Little things… like hospital appointments and googling what they’re planning to do to me next… planning how best to avoid a future stroke…. working out what caused the last one…. monitoring and diarising everything I eat or drink or smoke or exert energy towards… I’m discovering that ill health takes up a whole lot of time, not to mention a wholly unattractive level of self-obsession.

So, just lately I spend most of my days out in the garden, muscling bramble roots out of the soil (today’s winner was almost an inch thick and three feet underground), or planting next year’s fruit crops, or building and filling raised beds for the vegetables I plan on planting in the Spring, insh’Allah. I come into the house tired and aching when it goes dark at 4.30pm, resist the temptation to pour a stiff whisky and puff my way through several cigarettes, make myself a nice cup of tea instead and sit down to figure out what it is I should theoretically be eating for dinner that night. Sometimes it matches up with reality, oft-times not–too much salt, tonight, by far. But something is changing despite it all, if slowly; my eyesight’s finally back to full strength, after three weeks of living in a blurred universe, and I don’t have to avoid strong light any more.

I’m watching a lot more TV than usual–God I hate TV, it sucks the soul out of us all–but despite this waste of my evenings I do write something most nights when I turn in, whereas I’d normally be reading or re-reading some novel or other until it dropped from my unconscious hands. This small concession to the literary lifestyle is one concession more than I have been used to making over the last few years, and I’m happy to report that even such a miniscule amount of daily effort is starting to show results. I can now churn out a thousand words without taking hours over them, which means I’m half-way to my personal NaNo goal. Yay!

It’s taken a while, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I really would like to write the novel I set out to write for NaNoWriMo 2010, one day. It won’t happen in a month, though–far from it. It’ll happen at a nice, comfortable pace, somewhere nearer five hundred words a day than two thousand. Even assuming I do eventually regain the ability to write two thousand words in a day, I still wouldn’t want to write the first draft of a novel I cared about at that kind of speed.

Here’s why.

Firstly, I cannot for the life of me switch off my inner editor. I worked as an editor for so long that I couldn’t get any pleasure out of reading for over a year after I quit. I still automatically note the errors in every page I read (and I’m talking about published books here); I can, now, get past the urge to fix the errors and concentrate on the story instead; what I still can’t do is write anything at all without fixing my own typos and rearranging the paragraphs to flow better as I go along.

Secondly, I find it impossible to write something that requires research without actually doing the research! It’s not so many weeks since I wrote here that it would be very freeing to lose that restriction, but actually the opposite is the case. Then again, my NaNo project was based on an historical subject, and while it might be OK to imagine scenes and invent personalities to some extent, it did actually require in-depth knowledge of several key dramatis personae, for example. I’d no problem imagining the protagonist back into life, nor any member of his family, but I was all at sea when it came to his friends and colleagues.

This wouldn’t, of course, be a problem in a novel that had no basis in historical fact. Probably, my choice of subject matter was my first and worst decision when it comes to speed-writing.

Future NaNo-ers, take note! and be sure to write pure fantasy.

They did warn us, all those nice writers who fill out the web, that signing up for NaNoWriMo could make for a stressful November.

I really didn’t expect to land up in the stroke assessment unit at the local hospital in the first week of NaNo, though. Not without some warning symptom in advance, like high blood pressure or obesity or throbbing arteries or, y’know, anything at all really. And definitely not before I’m out of my 40s.

Still, there it is. A few days of dodgy vision in an eye that’s always worked–I now know–better than most eyes ever do, turned out to be a mini-stroke (actually two mini-strokes in quick succession, judging by the much-more-frightening dead hand syndrome that I put down to anxiety.) Bleh.

So here’s me, this person who never takes pills, eats & drinks whatever & whenever she likes, only gets one cold per annum, goes hillwalking on a regular basis and hasn’t bothered a doctor in the last 25 years, and I’m suddenly forced into contemplating the evils of lard, salt, whisky and–you guessed it–cigarettes as I munch my way through enough aspirin to make any willow weep. I have to say, this is definitely not the month I’d have chosen for giving up smoking! I’d planned on doing it before next Spring, though, so it’s not a major adjustment in the way it would’ve been, say, at any other time in the last couple of decades. Just a bit inconvenient for the little things we normally take for granted, like thinking.

I’m still writing my NaNoWriMo novel, albeit not as fast as I should be writing it. I had to take a couple of days out for sanity’s sake when the hospital got their hands on me, but I’ve no excuses now. The one good side-effect of all that aspirin is that all those middle-aged aches and pains we all learn to live with as we get older are completely gone from my life. Also, I can see out of both eyes this week, which is a definite plus!

The local Municipal Liaisons have been great, pouring useful info into my inbox like the nearest “meets” every week (unfortunately these are always timed to clash with my only evening class!) and pep talks that say things like “I only had 2000 words by November 7th last year but I still made it past the winning post, and so can you!” That particular email was a real boost for me, I have to say; I really thought I’d already blown it until then.

I can see myself giving up on the novel I started to write, though, because obviously I’m obsessing about other things right now and they keep bubbling up into the story. Thankfully, the remit I gave myself at the start wasn’t necessarily to come up with a novel (certainly not a saleable novel); it was simply to get into the habit of writing 2000 words a day, give or take. This being something that used to come easily to me a decade ago, but which no longer does. If I only start meeting that target by the final week I’ll be more than happy because I’ll have achieved what I set out to achieve, but in the meantime–of course it would be nice to be a NaNo winner. And at this stage of the game, that’s still possible.

It began, then.

It began on my mother’s birthday.

My mother, who was born itchy-footed, wanted to celebrate her day with a trip to the seaside–we both get a kick out of wild waves pitching into lighthouses and all that stuff–and so booked us into an hotel in Scarborough for the night. The hotel was within easy walking distance of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, where Alan Ayckbourn still occasionally directs. In fact his current play, Life of Riley, is on its World Premiere tour with the Stephen Joseph Theatre Company at present. We therefore booked tickets for Fiona Evans’ The Price of Everything, which is also a World Premiere. This play was billed as “tense and thrilling”. They weren’t kidding. It was well written, beautifully directed (by Noreen Kershaw), and so convincingly acted that my mother feared for the sanity of the lead. It had moments of humour in it amongst the darkness, and a great deal of tenderness. All this, but if we’d known the plot in advance we’d have avoided it simply because it was very, very dark. Definitely not birthday celebration material. Brilliant play, go see it when it comes your way, but be warned that you will go home tense and emotionally drained and in need of large amounts of alcohol.

My NaNo word count for November 1st: 0.

Today we drove home from Scarborough. Mum took the wheel as far as Flamborough Head because it was sunny, despite the icy gale-force gusts. We went for a walk along the cliff top, then sat drinking tea in a nearby café until we could feel our hands again. And then it went dark, and the rains they did rain down. All the way home, I drove by other peoples’ rear lights. Couldn’t see a darn thing. For hours. We arrived home–but you guessed it already. Tense, emotionally drained and in need of large amounts of alcohol.

My NaNo word count for November 2nd: 503 (because I felt I really, really ought to write the first page at least.)

Not quite the flying start I’d envisaged, then.

The weird thing is that my first page has absolutely nothing in common with the first page I must have written and re-written at least a hundred times in my head before I actually sat down with the laptop. I’d planned to begin with an Inuit legend, but what came out was more in the way of a job interview, written as a monologue, with the reader as interviewee.

This story isn’t going to head in the direction I expected, at all. I just hope it doesn’t miss the best bits out!

What to write about, indeed? How does anyone decide what to write 50,000 words about?

I suppose if I wanted to write something for publication I’d have plotted out a bog-standard murder mystery or some such thing, but I’m not playing that game. I’m simply interested in getting in some writing practice and speeding up my output, which is abysmally slow these days. It’s very freeing already to be done with the inner editor and with the need for research; to know there won’t be anyone reading my scribbles in earnest, if at all. Still, I know from experience that it can be difficult to keep a story going when it runs out of steam, so I need to find a subject that has a lot of meat on it. Something that can be told in more than one way, preferably, so that I can change perspectives at whim if need be.

I’ll start with the obvious question: What do I know about?

From past lives: sibling rivalry and affection, astrology, rock climbing, orienteering, Christian extremism, folk music, rock’n'roll music, early computing, performance, gay rights, stand-up comedy, taxi driving, truck driving, Brixton around the time of the riots, left-wing politics, womens’ peace camps, Judaism, Jerusalem, small towns, hotel work, seaside towns, vegetarianism, hitch-hiking, camping, mysticism (in many forms), drug addiction, widowhood, raising toddlers, Web programming & open source programming culture.

From now: outdoor gear design, long-distance walking, the Middle East conflict, volcanoes and earthquakes, cooking, growing fruit and vegetables, laying paths and building garden structures (yes my life has quietened down some).

Not a sausage out of that lot, unless I wanted to write a Dan Brown style paranoia-fest about Jerusalem. Which I really, really don’t.

What do I read? Hell, anything. (Not helpful.)

Which authors do I most admire? Graham Greene, P G Wodehouse, Saki, the Bronte sisters and of course Jane Austen. Terry Pratchett sometimes, Douglas Adams always, but then Dick Francis and Agatha Christie occasionally get in there too. All for disparate reasons, and the list changes on a regular basis. (No clues there either then.)

Which people do I most admire? Ah, now we’re talking. I have a hero–a real-life hero, although he’s been dead almost a century. An explorer: Gino Watkins. A man who, by all accounts, came across as an effete dandy and socialite, but who led three Arctic expeditions before the age of 25. Someone who believed nothing was impossible, and who lived his life by that understanding. Someone who single-handedly changed the way Polar expeditions were planned and carried out. Someone whose body was never found, who may still be frozen into the ice-cap like the coming of some Arthur-esque Inuit legend.

And there are sideshow mysteries that could become a main thread in a novel. Could Gino have fathered a child by an Inuk woman, for instance? Possibly; it’s almost certain that some of his expedition team had conjugal relations with the indigenous locals. Do we know for sure that Gino died when they said he did? Maybe not, but it’s very unlikely he survived. We’d have to conveniently forget that he was someone with a highly developed sense of responsibility to both his expedition team and his family, for that line of inquiry to go anywhere. Plus, he was in love and newly engaged… Does he have any relevance to us now, in 2010? Yes. Yes, he does; that final, fatal expedition was otherwise considered a success, and without it we may never have had cheap flights between the UK and the US of A. Y’know, those flights that are helping to melt the Arctic ice Gino loved so much.

Irony aside, there’s a lot about Gino that is truly inspiring, and will remain so across all time. Hence my use of the word “hero”.

There are a lot of potential stories, then, in and around this single historical figure. A lot of ways to approach the Gino Watkins story; myriad openings and closures; almost infinite possibilities. So I shall fictionalise Gino, or perhaps the people around Gino, or both; and I’m pretty sure he’ll take up at least the requisite 50,000 words, even (especially?) without research.

Signing your life (or at least, a chunk of it) away is all too easy these days. I signed up for NaNoWriMo for the first time on October 3rd–long ago enough that I’ve already forgotten my site password. I know of no quicker route to instant fear. What if I can’t think of anything to write about? What if I start out really well and then can’t sustain it? What if I “freeze” on the first night and make a false start that leads me somewhere I didn’t want to go?

Well, I suppose the sky won’t fall if any of those things happen. But it’s still scary to make this kind of commitment.

I’ve made two attempts to write a novel before now. The first was for my degree; we had the option of writing a novel, a short story collection or a dissertation for our final project. We were encouraged to plan our project, regardless of the chosen format. And I did. I sweated blood during the planning phase. I had the whole thing sketched out on sheaves of A4 paper, literally as a pattern (eyes down, Matt!), with snippets of dialogue scattered among the circles and arrows. My tutor seemed pleased with me. I felt confident. And then, just a few short weeks before the first actual writing was due in, my grandmother died in my arms.

Suddenly I didn’t want to write my clever novel any more. I wanted–needed–to write about her. And that’s precisely what I did. I wrote non-stop for just over a week, deadline looming, and presented my tutor with (I thought) a complete mess. He loved it. It wasn’t until I was typing up my flatmate’s dissertation (on Feminist Post-Modernism) that I found out why he loved it. The mess I’d produced ticked all the Feminist Post-Modernist boxes. It included recipes and cooking–lots of cooking–and different styles of writing for different historical periods, and split PoV, and hey–it was about my Irish grandmother! I’d written precisely the kind of novel educated females were publishing in the late 1980s; in short, I’d written the promising first draft of a novel at the height of contemporary literary fashion, without even knowing it.

My second attempt, a decade down the line, also began with circles and arrows–and this time around, I actually started to write the novel I’d planned to write. Man, it was dire. The dialogue was turgid; every character represented something to somebody else, as in Thomas Hardy; the landscapes I’d found so easy to convey in my grandmother’s story were static and empty and devoid of colour in this.

I learned my lesson then and there. I am not someone who can plan a book and expect my writing to live on the page. In my experience, it won’t. I’m the same with sewing projects; if I rough-cut the cloth and tidy up later, it all pans out nicely. If I try for precision from the start, the mistakes I make in the early stages are too big for redemption.

So. I already knew, on October 3rd, that I wouldn’t be scribbling circles and arrows for my NaNo attempt. What I didn’t know was what on Earth I could write about that might sustain itself for 50,000 words. But more of that next week.