Three Guidelines for a Three-Day Novel
To generate a 50K-word first draft in a month, your pace is 1667 words per day.
To do the same in three days instead of thirty? 16,667 words.
(Assuming you write 20 hours of each day for three days, which would be insane but also maximize your writing time, that’s 833 words per hour. Writing 17 hours a day leaves more time for sleep, but ups your hourly count to 980 words each hour. Good luck, y’all!)
Anybody else boggled by this idea?
Right, I see everyone has raised their hands. (image from pixabay)
Did you realize there is a three-day novel writing contest that actually exists?
From its modest beginnings as a barroom challenge, it grew to attract the interest and support of neophyte and seasoned writers alike, from Canada, the U.S. and beyond. Now, more than four decades later, it has become a unique contribution to world literary history and a put-your-keyboard-where-your-mouth-is rite of passage for hundreds of writers each year.
Wow, really? Hundreds of writers participate each year? I wonder how much coffee they go through.
If you thought, “Wow, what a great idea!”, sorry, it’s too late for this year, but you can mark it on your calendar for Labor Day weekend next year.
Spoiler: I didn’t think, “Wow, what I great idea!” I thought, “Wow, that’s insane.” Let me see. Let’s say you’re going to call 50,000 words a “novel,” as is the case for NaNoWriMo. I wrote MARAG in 18 days; it was 112,000 words in draft (it went to 125,000 in revision). At the exact same average rate of writing, that means I should in theory be able to write 50,000 words in eight days. That means doing this contest would mean writing nearly three times faster.
Wow, that’s insane.
However, should you feel like tackling this challenge, the linked post provides suggestions:
Set goals, but don’t obsess.
Generate without judgment, but don’t cheat.
Start early, but don’t start from scratch.
Those look like reasonable goals to me. “Don’t start from scratch” means you ought to know about the characters and the plot before you begin. I think that’s accurate. I couldn’t have written MARAG so fast except I knew both Sinowa and Marag, plus I had a lot of the plot in mind, including quite a few specific scenes.
Meanwhile!
My brother commented recently that this year, my goal should be to achieve “No No Wri Mo,” meaning I should take a complete break in November. He wasn’t wrong. A break would be nice. In some ways. Maybe I will at least manage a partial break in November. It would be great to whittle down the projects to the point that all I’m doing in November is proofreading SILVER CIRCLE, nothing else. I can hardly imagine what that would be like. Except it would be great to read other authors’ books for a while!
Please Feel Free to Share:
I do NaNoWriMo every year, and I’ve never ‘lost’, but my writing pace during the rest of the year slows down drastically, ’cause life (and frequent migraines; computer screens don’t do good things to me when I’m in that state). I cannot even imagine writing 16,000+ words in a day.
Honestly, you’re insanely productive and I’m impressed by the rate at which you produce finished books of such high quality. I . . . am not that fast of a writer, even when I’m concentrating my energy on it.
People say that, EC, but honestly, it probably makes a difference that I’m basically a hermit. In an earlier era, I’d probably be waving everyone else out the door and saying, “Yes, have a nice time!” and then sitting down with a sigh of relief to illuminate manuscripts in peace.
Completely off the subject, but EC, I think you were the one who recommended the Galleries of Stone series. Thanks so much for that. I really enjoyed it, and then was delighted to find what appears to be the first of a sequel series.
There are scads of people who do the vast majority of their NaNoWriMo writing on last days of November. Including, yes, in three days. The first NaNoWriMo included one participant who gave up at 12,000 words only to have a brilliant idea and pound out the rest in those days.
Mary Catelli, I’m stunned to know that. I’m very much the kind of person who would divide 50,000 by 30 and then aim for 2000 words per day.
An interesting article about NaNoWriMo (the non-profit) and AI – https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/generative-ai-backlash-hits-annual-writing-event-prompting-resignations/
I’m very unimpressed by the argument that AI “levels the playing field” by conferring on writers the ability to fake having skill. This notion looks so plainly stupid that I have to assume sympathy has melted the brains of those who take that position.
I’m going to take the unpopular side and come out in favour of NaNoWriMo’s approach to AI. First off, it’s not a competition and the organisers aren’t trying to police anything. They can’t stop people using AI, so there’s merit in admitting that. And stating their policy might provide reassurance to the more neurotic type of people who are forever wondering if they’re ‘allowed’ to do things.
As to the bit about differently abled and skilled people, it depends very much on their use case. If a dyslexic person puts their first draft through an AI for spelling and grammar checks, that’s a reasonable thing to do and genuinely does save time that a neurotypical person wouldn’t need to spend in the first place. If a chronic over-writer tells the AI to review their first draft and highlight where they could cut, that saves the eyeballs of some poor beta reader.
The thing everyone objects to is getting the AI to write the whole novel for you, but since AIs can’t (yet) write coherently at that length, it’s not a problem anyway. If some NaNo writer wants to delude themself that their AI-generated ‘novel’ represents their achievement, the only person they’re really harming is themself.
So I think that the legions of people who leap to their keyboards to demand NO AI EVER!!! are both overreacting and discouraging people from potentially helpful use cases. It’s a pity that the NaNo organisers caved under pressure instead of explaining their stance.
Rowan, I don’t actually know that I’d come down on a No AI Ever For Anything position. But look at this:
NaNoWriMo … argued in its post that condemning AI would ignore issues of class and ability, suggesting the technology could benefit those who might otherwise need to hire human writing assistants or have differing cognitive abilities.
Bold is mine.
If you don’t want people to think you mean, “Yay, AI can help people fake having skill!” or “Yay, AI can help people who can’t write fake being able to write!” then this is not the kind of phrasing you want to use.
Saying, Oh, that’s not what we meant is not helpful after the fact. If that’s not what they meant, why did they say that? If what they meant was, “Writers can use AI for spell and grammar checking” or “Writers can use AI tools for editing but not for generating text,” then that’s what they should have said. If what they meant was “NaNoWriMo is not the AI police and we’re not going to check for AI generated content because that is not at all what we do,” then that’s what they should have said, and a very reasonable position that would be, too. That’s exactly what they should have said. Or they should have not said a single word about AI at all.
Right now, at this moment, people are loading fake stories to Amazon and then asking, “How can I get my novel The London Fog Murders to sell?” Or, as this one seems to be, possibly using this fake book to promote a fake or scam publisher. I don’t think this is harmless, and I don’t think the idea that authors who do this are only harming themselves is necessarily correct. “Authors” who do this are often scammers who are trying to rack up KU pages read with fake books or otherwise attempting to defraud Amazon, readers, and/or naive authors.
I grant that it seems less harmful for someone to generate something for NaNoWriMo and fool themselves they are writing — but it’s not a delusion I would honestly want to foster if I could avoid it.