The NaNoed Pilgrim

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Writing

HolycrapIamreallyexcitedandsomewhathyperactiverightnow!!!

Alright, let me take a breath here. And another one. And a third.

Whew.

So, as you might have guessed from the title, I’m taking part in this yer’s NaNoWriMo challenge. For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month; every November thousands of authors, aspiring and published alike, all take part in an effort to write 1,667 words a day, totalling 50,000 words by the end of the month. Many do not make it, giving up and falling by the wayside, but others succeed. I am one of those who has just succeeded.

Well, technically. I hit the 50,000 word mark a few days ago and yesterday, I finished my novel, but only because I cheated and had about 44,000 words already tucked away before November.

The book I was writing and am now going to draft, redraft and edit the crap out of, began life in South Korea on the 16th of August of this year. It started with the working title of The Pilgrim, and it initially came from a bad place for a writer to be, that of the zone of creative deadlock.

At the time, I had just spent a year when my long-term writing was suffering. I had ideas in that period, good ideas. There was The Stolen God, a high fantasy novel in a Mesopotamian setting, Digivinity, a cyberpunk story set in a futuristic London, Aetherwynd, about a gigantic space-borne city modelled off Elizabethan London and Principles of Oratiomancy, Volume 3, a sort of steampunky fantasy thing with a lot in common with China Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels. Some of them I got a good amount of done; Digivinity nearly reached 10,000 words, and both Principles and The Stolen God had their entire plot planned and the world built in meticulous detail, but Principles didn’t get past the first chapter and The Stolen God hit about 5,000 words and just petered out. Aetherwynd didn’t even get started.

They were all planned and worked out. The Pilgrim, on the hand, kind of blindsided me.

I started writing it as my current writing projects were getting nowhere, and I felt that at the very least I had to write something. In essence, I just cribbed ideas and characters from my half-baked or unfinished works, started out with the broadest possible outline and went from there.

And it went really well. I had the first 15,000 words written in ten days. The plot was worked out and as the character of the story’s titular pilgrim was fleshed out, The Pilgrim became The Shadowed Pilgrim. It stalled across October as inspiration and energy ran dry, just before the final stretch, before I finally  used NaNoWriMo to give me the final push that leads to me being able to say that, on the 5th of November 2013, with a total of 55,638 words, the first draft of The Shadowed Pilgrim is complete.

It’s a mongrel book, in a lot of ways, and I can pinpoint the ideas that I’ve cribbed from my abortive works that were included in The Shadowed Pilgrim. One of the leads from Digivinity was plucked across, a vague plot outline was chosen, Principles‘ setting was basically launched into spaaaaaaace! and I added the sort of surrealist bent of Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples’ truly excellent Saga comics, and the story went ahead. It went ahead with no real plan aside from the vaguest of plot outlines and a few character ideas and by the end it turned into a story exploring the nature of morality, justice and revenge, with a weird, wacky and wonderful setting, alien species of multifarious stripes, a Leone-esque gunslinging mercenary who can bend time, Wuxia-style martial artist priests (because clearly what I need are even more genres), Lovecraftian horrors, an undead doctor, Zeppelins galore and two (hopefully) well-rounded female leads who are the main driving forces in the story. Oh, and because I watched a lot of Doctor Who when I was younger, it turns out everyone in space has a British accent.

Now that it’s complete, it leaves me slightly worried that I might be a really bad writer. Not in a sort of ‘writes books equal to Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight in quality’ bad, but instead in a kind of ‘you didn’t really go about this in the right way’ bad.

You see, the thing is that whenever I read another author’s writing methods, what I notice is that one of the key things is that you have to plan. If you have no plan, no detailed plot outline, no character outlines then you can have no book. And yet that was basically what I did; I had the vaguest of plans, my characters, with the main exceptions of the two leads, were just written with broadest of personality archetypes in mind, and my worldbuilding had the vaguest categories of “space, steampunk, fantasy” and had the essential process of ‘if you like the idea, put it in the world’. And you read the lunacy that occurred above, and somehow that lunacy worked, even if it leaves me considering saying that its genre is either ‘New Weird’ or ‘I don’t know’.

In all honesty, I never saw myself in this position just a few months ago.  I had consigned myself to creative bankruptcy and viewed writing more as a fruitless exercise in futility more than anything, and without the drive to write that I gained from NaNoWriMo I doubt The Shadowed Pilgrim would have been completed. There’s a lot more work to do, but I’m one step closer to achieving the dream.

I should probably also write some nice letters to Brian K. Vaughn, Fiona Staples and China Miéville along the lines of ‘so long and thanks for all the inspiration’.