Jane Rawson is a wildly inventive writer whose books Formaldehyde, From The Wreck, and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists began as NaNoWriMo manuscripts. I called her at home in Tasmania, Australia to get her tips on Week Three.
Okay, we’ve crossed the halfway point of NaNoWriMo. What challenges are you typically facing at this point?
By Week Three, I’m definitely behind on word count. And I’m at the point where I’m like, “I could just stop now and this could all be over. I’m too far behind and it’s not worth pressing on.”
The challenge is saying to yourself, “Well, you know what? You’re halfway there. You can endure this for another couple weeks.” Because it’s not really that long, is it? That’s kind of what’s great about the whole premise is you’re putting yourself through this painful but also amazing thing. And the amazingness will probably start to happen as you get towards the end of this week.
Tell me more about the amazingness.
The amazingness is when the story takes over. When your subliminal brain starts doing all that fantastic magic that it does. When you are completely immersed in a manuscript, your brain is doing stuff you will never understand. It’s finding connections between things and pulling up material from your past that you’d forgotten about and just making magic on the page where suddenly the story really does start writing itself.
There are so many moments where you go “Oh that’s what happens. Of course that’s what happens.” It’s such a treat. I mean you are you’re creating something that didn’t exist, and it’s a whole world and it came out of your head.
Why do you think these moments come more frequently in Week Three?
Week One is where you’re using all the ideas you thought you were going to use for this book. Even if you haven’t sat down and made a bit of a list or thought about what your book will be about, you’ll have ideas that you’ve been building up in your head. All those come out in Week One.
And then in Week Two, you’re like, ah, I’ve run out of ideas. And then you’re just typing random stuff on the page hoping to hit your word count. It’s all looking terrible, which is why by the beginning of Week Three you’re like, “I should just stop and go to a bar. What am I doing?”
That’s where a lot of people stop writing.
By the end of Week Three, your brain is doing that dredging work of pulling up the things you didn’t know were going to be in this story. If you’re still pressing on, you’re deeply immersed in the world of whatever this is that you’re creating in such a way that your subconscious brain is thinking about it all the time and is working on it when you’re asleep or at work or whatever else you have to do.
And that’s the point where it starts pulling in the things that you didn’t know you knew about, that you didn’t know you were thinking about, that you didn’t know were going to be part of this book. For me, that’s where the hum starts to happen.
Are there things that help you keep going long enough to reach that humming phase?
I have regular dates during the month where I meet up with friends and write together. Being able to have someone who you can have a half hour chat with beforehand about how terrible everything is and how tired you are. And then you just sit there and work for two hours. You can hear the other people scratching or clicking or whatever it is and it’s very motivating to keep going. You can’t just get up and go in the other room and do something else.
I’m curious what you do when you lose the thread of your story?
This will not surprise anyone who has read my books, but if I lose the thread, I usually just start again with a new character. I’m like, “I can’t remember what was going on here.” So I’ll switch to a hundred years later where we’re with Dave and he’s cooking a barbecue. “Weren’t you writing a novel about octopuses?” Sure. Whatever. Here’s Dave. He’s making a barbecue, and I’ll write that for a while.
Sometimes that little break of having a complete scene shift or point of view shift gives your subconscious a chance to work on the other thing in the background instead of trying to force something that isn’t working. I end up with novels that have a lot of different things going on in them. Hopefully they all make sense together for some reason that may not be a very obvious reason. But you can feel the sense of it as you’re reading it.
Another thing I’ve found helpful when I get to the end of one bit is to write myself some notes about what might go next, or something else that could happen. You know “5,000 words from now it would be good if so-and-so reappear.” It’s really just things to get me back into the work quickly.
You leave these notes in the manuscript itself?
Yes.
Do you include them in your word count?
[Laughs] No cheating like that. I’m writing in a notebook as well. When I’m writing more slowly, I like to keep a process diary about what worked in that day’s writing, or what didn’t work. “Here’s how I’m feeling about everything. Here’s where I’m thinking about going next.”
It’s great for future you because, you know, you write a novel, you get it published, God willing. And then later when you go to write the next one, you’re like, “I don’t know how to do anything. Why is this so bad? I used to be able to write.” It’s so good to be able to go back and read through those notes and see that you always feel that way. It’s part of the process
Speaking of publishing, what advice do you have for someone who is looking at their first draft right now and feeling like “There’s no way this is ever going to be shareable with the world.”
I think it’s really hard as a writer to remember that the books that you love were once a pile of crap. We don’t get any visibility on that. We don’t see those first drafts. We’ve never seen the authors in agony going “I’m so bad at this.” We haven’t seen all the rejections they had when trying to get it published, all the times they rewrote it over and over again. All of that is invisible, and I think that does a disservice to us as writers.
My advice is to recognize that making a book is heaps of hard work and the book will be bad for ages. And to you, the book might even look bad at the point where it gets published. Because you’re the only person who can see all the terrible stuff that you wrote as you were doing it.
It’s something writers often ask. They’re like, “is this any good?” And there is no answer to that question. Do you like it? Are you proud of it? Do you feel like you’ve done the best possible job you can do? Have you learned everything you can learn to make it better?
Then it’s good. It’s good.
Jane is the author of the essay collection Human/Nature: On Life in a Wild World, novels A History of Dreams, From the Wreck, and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, a novella, Formaldehyde, and the non-fiction book The Handbook: Surviving & Living with Climate Change. She is the Managing Editor at Island magazine and co-edited Breathing space, a collection of reflections and projections on nature in Tasmania.