Today’s post is by author Elinor Florence.
Several years ago, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, a creative writing event known as NaNoWriMo.
I joined hundreds of thousands of other writers around the planet who tackled the ambitious goal of completing a 50,000-word novel in thirty days.
In one sense, I was successful. I dutifully churned out 2,000 words a day and at the end of the month, I had a 60,000-word first draft.
That was a mistake I will never make again.
Leaving the station
I began to research the concept for my historical novel seven months earlier, on April 1, 2020. By the time November rolled around I had read dozens of books, recorded a raft of notes, and dreamed up a story. I mistakenly believed I was ready to start writing.
Set in 1905, my novel titled Finding Flora concerns a Scottish newlywed who jumps off the train in the middle of the night to escape from her abusive husband, and finds herself alone on the vast prairie. Flora claims a homestead and endures the deprivations of pioneer life, supported in her struggles by several female neighbours including an American couple, a Welsh widow, and a Métis woman.
On the first day of November, I happily wrote the first thrilling chapter, in which Flora leaps from the train.
From there, it was all downhill.
Wheels coming off
Almost immediately, I realized I needed more of the details that lend authenticity to every work of historical fiction. For example, I had located an old train schedule, but I had no idea what a sleeping compartment in a steam train looked like. I had researched the climate, but not what Flora might be wearing. Each time I hit a snag, I wrote (while swearing in my head) “blankety, blank, blank.”
My greatest challenge was Jessie, the Indigenous character. I had no concept of how she would have spoken and behaved in that time period. I was mortally afraid of writing the wrong thing and betraying my own Indigenous heritage.
But there were larger factual issues, ones that impacted the plot. For example, what were the government’s conditions for filing on a homestead and more importantly, keeping it? The time crunch led me to fabricate laws that later proved to be totally incorrect and resulted in massive headaches.
The storyline was another tangled web. I had imagined the book in broad strokes only, so I started each morning with no clue about what to write next. Nevertheless, I plodded along day after day, filling my word quota.
Screeching to a halt
At the end of the month, I had a shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott calls it. This one was beyond shitty. It was so badly written, so amateurish, that I moaned aloud when I reread it. The piece had no continuity, no rising tension, and no climax. It was little more than a jumble of scenes occupied by wooden characters.
I was so demoralized that I digitally shelved the manuscript for a year, hiding it under several layers of desktop folders, convinced that I never wanted to see the loathsome thing again.
Getting back on track
A year later, my writing buddies who liked the story idea urged me to revisit it. With the utmost reluctance, I fired up the literary boiler. I knew this revision would require more effort than putting lipstick on a pig. I would have to resurrect an entire porker from the dead.
Rewriting was far more difficult than firing off that scattergun first draft. I discovered untold flaws, consulted additional sources, and rewrote almost every scene. That took me four months.
I then submitted it to an Indigenous sensitivity editor. Thankfully she didn’t find anything offensive, but she red-flagged about a dozen instances that needed attention. (For example, I had Jessie wearing mukluks instead of moccasins—mukluks were not worn by Plains Cree in 1905.)
With those corrections made, I hired a professional developmental editor. She identified several major plot inconsistencies, a direct result of my overreliance on that dreadful first draft to drive the action. All too often, I had driven it recklessly in the wrong direction. Those revisions took a further three months of gruelling labor.
Finally, I felt ready to submit Finding Flora to a publisher. To my delight, Simon & Schuster offered me a contract!
But that didn’t mean my work was done. The publisher launched yet another structural edit. The story was told from two points of view, and my new editor tasked me with removing the second POV altogether. That took weeks of swearing and hair-tearing as I struggled to find other means of revealing the information previously relayed through the second character.
Reaching the station
My novel finally arrived at its final destination. Finding Flora will hit the bookstores on April 1, 2025—exactly five years to the fateful day when I started working on the book.
The only thing that remains of my original manuscript is the first chapter and that, too, has been rewritten multiple times. The plot now makes sense, the characters are fully developed, and, thanks to my slavish attention to historical detail, it has the ring of authenticity.
However, I believe I could have achieved this level of excellence much sooner, and with far less angst. Because of my NaNoWriMo, I estimate that I lost about two years.
In fairness, perhaps historical fiction isn’t the right genre for writing a speedy first draft. Perhaps a fantasy or a romance author might have more success. Surely NaNoWriMo wouldn’t be so popular if it didn’t work for so many people.
But if you are currently participating in this massive exercise, or plan to tackle it in future, these are my suggestions for a better experience.
1. Create a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene outline. The quick-and-dirty process is better suited to pantsters than plotters like me. Creative ideas come thick and fast when you are forced to sit at your computer every day—in my case, too many ideas. I needed a blueprint to keep me on track. Prepare as detailed a plot as possible.
2. Do the bulk of your research ahead of time—preferably all of it. There’s nothing to take your head out of the game and waste precious hours like the necessity to look something up, especially if you absolutely must get it right from the get-go. Facts form the foundation of fiction.
3. Don’t imagine you will have anything resembling a finished book at the end of November. Unless you are a gifted writer, be prepared to spend weeks, perhaps months, tearing apart and rewriting your first draft.
4. Finally, don’t hesitate to give up in the middle of the month. My own reluctance to throw in the towel caused me months of unnecessary work and frustration trying to get my novel back on the right track.
I’m currently pondering my next novel, but I will never again make the fatal mistake of trying to write a first draft in thirty days.
Following a career in journalism, Elinor Florence’s passion for the past inspired her to write fact-based historical novels about strong women. Her new novel Finding Flora will be published by Simon & Schuster on April 1, 2025. She’s absurdly sentimental about old photographs and handwritten letters and heritage buildings, and often writes about her love of history in her monthly blog, Letters From Windermere. When not at her lakeview home in the Canadian Rockies, she can usually be found in her truck, driving to the nearest museum or flea market. For more: www.elinorflorence.com.
Thanks so much for sharing, Elinor. I needed this blog post! I too had a disastrous NaNoWriMo experience trying to write the first draft of my historical fiction novel (also set in Canada during pre-WWI years). The difference is that once the wheels fell off for me (after Chapter 2), I was so discouraged that I threw in the towel immediately. Now I’m trying to turn my attention to completing the research and getting a deeper understanding of the era. Your book sounds fantastic–I pre-ordered a copy!
You are welcome to learn from my mistakes, Jahleen!
The older and more experienced I get (working professionally both as a journalist and music producer for decades), the more I place priority on quality over quantity and speed. Many publishing-industry pundits suggest you spend no more than a year writing a book before moving on to the next project. While that may be sufficient time to write in certain genres that require little or no research, I think it’s total bs as an all-embracing guideline. It’s far better to write something masterful in five years than it is to write five flaccid pieces that will never gain the public spotlight. By fastidiously honing what you’ve written, you also more quickly come to recognize all the weak joints in your writing writ large, rather than repeat the same mistakes.
Yes, I agree. Slow and steady wins the race.
I had a similar experience in the same year, except I was writing a sci-fi horror! I think ultimately if you want to take your novel seriously, NaNo isn’t necessarily the vehicle for anything near polished. With fantasy, or any other made up world, you are making the historical rules–on the surface, that sounds easier, but it really isn’t! To create a rich world that makes sense, the history and rules have to make sense – and you’re not even touching that part of the iceberg when you write your story. It took me 20 years to write the world of the fantasy series I’m currently writing. With that said, I wouldn’t pass off fantasy as something easily achievable during NaNo, because it isn’t (if you’re taking the story seriously).
Interesting — I thought it would be quicker and easier if you could make stuff up, but you are reminding us that even an imaginary world must have some underlying logic.
Thanks for sharing what you learned through this process, Elinor. I’ve never done NaNoWriMo, but I find myself in the middle of a memoir, realizing now how much more research I still need to do. It’s frustrating. Congratulations on finishing the novel and selling it to Simon & Schuster!
Thank you so much for your kind words, Kathryn!
Thanks for opening a window on your writing process and sharing your post-mortem analysis! While there are many books that provide useful checklists for aspiring novel writers, there’s nothing like getting suggestions based on first-hand experience. I’d like to know more about what goes into doing “research” for a short story or for a novel. Any advice on that?
Meenakshi: This is the sort of topic that requires an entire book to answer! I’d take a look at other posts on this topic at this site for a starting point:
https://janefriedman.com/dos-and-donts-of-writing-historical-fiction/
https://janefriedman.com/the-feel-of-real-researching-a-novel/
These are also helpful resources:
https://thehistoryquill.com/
https://awriterofhistory.com/
Thank you very much. I’ll take a look at the links.
I read forty pioneer memoirs in total and made notes on about thirty of them before starting to write my novel on homesteading (the other ten memoirs were either repetitious or lacked the information I needed). I organized all my notes under headings: Landscape, Weather, Clothing, Animals, etc. As I wrote, I continued to find gaps and search for further information. It’s a long process.
Elinor, I chuckled at your misadventures writing Finding Flora but in the end, despite tearing your hair out, you pulled off a masterpiece. Congratulations!
Your experience is exactly why I have never joined a mad dash writing event like this. For my historical narrative, not too far from your genre, I have to research every single sentence to make sure it’s true. Nothing wrong with being slow and accurate along the way. It saves a lots of tears and headaches later.
Finding Flora was well worth figuring out what the homesteaders ate, how they dressed, and what shoes they wore. Heartiest congratulations.
Thank you, Andrea. Next time I will be slow and accurate along the way, for sure.
I can appreciate that writing historical novels might not mesh well with something like NaNoWriMo. Unfortunately, I’ve heard too many writers slamming NaNoWriMo lately as if it, in and of itself, is somehow a bad thing. Something that could do more harm than good.
I guess it’s all in how you look at it. NaNoWriMo got me to finally sit down and begin writing. To stuff down the irrational terror I had of committing my ideas to paper, and to do it anyway. To temporarily silence the critical voice in my head that said I couldn’t possibly write good fiction. To lay down scene after disjointed scene, trusting that at some point I would be able to meld them all into a cohesive whole.
And I have. A four book series which I am in the process of publishing. Because once I got the “bug” I had to keep going. As a confirmed “pantser,” writing this way is the only way I can get the stories out.
So NaNoWriMo is not a “bad” thing, just a different thing that won’t fit everyone’s style.
Agreed! I think it could work very well for busting through writer’s block, especially for the beginner.
Indeed 🙂 Just to be clear, though, I’ve now done it a dozen times. I no longer need to use it to break through writer’s block. I use it to create new content. A brand new story. And it works well for me each time. This year, I’m not doing it officially, but using the energy of the month to complete the first full draft of a story I began last November. So…it can be a very useful tool on many levels.
“Facts form the foundation of fiction.” What a phenomenal observation! Thank you, Elinor!
I’ve delved into a lot of non-fiction in research for my historical novel set in biblical Jerusalem. Having a blast working on it – I’m nearly through my second draft, and there will be a third and probably a fourth draft before I deem it done. But I happen to thrive on revision, and have great fun fleshing out the story on that first-draft skeleton, even the most challenging parts.
NaNoWriMo doesn’t attract me, mostly because I have so much else going on that I couldn’t commit to 1,667 words per day. I think not, too, because I’m a pantser, and I savor ideas that constantly come in, which make me think, “Ooo! How can I incorporate that?”
Having never participated in NaNoWriMo, I will still make bold to say, no matter how many words accumulate over the course of 30 days, whether the 50,000-word goal is reached, or only 30,000 words, or 15,000, or 5,000, that is progress. The wise recognize that a 30-day marathon will not result in a “completed” novel. It is, and can only ever be, a first draft.
It’s like a jigsaw puzzle spread out on a table. The goal is the picture on the box, but we must work our way through the puzzle, fitting together each piece in its place. I see rewriting and revision as that process of fitting the pieces together. It takes time, it must take time to fully realize. But why feel like a failure because we can’t do it in an hour, or in thirty days?
Savor the process, I say. Enjoy the ride. You’ll be surprised about what you uncover in yourself when you invest yourself in the process. Don’t forget: You are CREATING something unique that never before existed! How cool is that!?!?
As an inveterate jigsaw puzzler, I do love your analogy! Alas, books are puzzles that can assembled in a thousand different ways and the challenge is to find the best arrangement. I do feel NaNoWriMo was an important experiment that taught me something about myself and how I work. My only regret is that I didn’t jump off that speeding train before the end of the month.
I love hearing this discussion about Nanowrimo. I am currently in the midst of it and am in a town at this moment that almost no one knows about it so I have no one to discuss it with.
Thank you for sharing your experiences they are encouraging, all of them.
I have so many books that have been started and have so much writing about them but something felt so staid about it that I decided this year, as I’m getting older and choosing this path a little more in different ways, to just sit down and close my eyes and let it rip. My fingers on the keyboard and see what comes through.
I am quite amazed at the directions things are going in and pretty excited to have this opportunity to be pushed and have the authors that give advice to read up on to encourage as I go. It has really been helpful and looks like I’ll be writing a book that is very different than I would ever have anticipated.
A space, traveling between worlds story. I can be a pantser, but this is also world building. Exciting 1st Shitty Draft.
Thank you
The word “exciting” says it all, my dear fellow writer. The work has to be engaging and interesting, or why are we doing it? We are mental mountain climbers and hopefully feel the same thrill of achievement when we reach the summit.
I’m in the same boat as Debra: NaNoWriMo was how I finally took my book from my brain and onto ‘paper’. I’d been nurturing an idea for a trilogy for decades but had no idea if I could even produce one full novel. During the first series of pandemic lockdowns, when I was stuck in my home for the most part, I thought I’d give the event a shot. If I could produce anywhere near the 50,000-word target, I’d have the makings of a book. The structure of NaNo is part of what attracted me: to set a month aside and just write, without worrying about editing until later.
It was never my intention to complete a novel in that time, just to see if I could actually produce chapters and plot points and dialogue. Lo and behold, by the end of that November, I had about 17 chapters written, and I thought: I can do this, I can write a novel. Some of my chapters were annotated with plot points and details I wanted to circle back to (not included in the word count). Four years later, I’ve published two of the three books in the series, and will be publishing the final novel this coming May.
While some writers may want to try and pound out an entire novel during NaNoWriMo, I don’t think that’s its best use. I recommend it to people to stop just playing around with a book in their heads and actually get it started.
I am extremely happy to hear that NaNoWriMo works so well for other writers. Your advice to set aside the month and start work on a project makes so much more sense than writing an entire draft in 30 days. In fact, I would suggest that event organizers change the parameters to give writers more flexibility.
Oh my, I recommend against doing a fantasy for NaNoWriMo, especially if you haven’t spent months/years in world-building. I made that mistake, thinking that as I wrote, ideas would just magically (haha) appear. I also planned two timelines, one for each of the two major characters! Even as I got farther and farther behind, my body was betraying me. I had a full-time, keyboard-intensive job, and the added stress of 2000 words a day finally locked up my wrists and shoulders, resulting in 26 physical therapy sessions. So yeah, no fantasy recommended. 😊
This is the first comment I have read regarding the physical demands of writing! Depending on how long it takes to produce the required word count, you might spend hours every day in November hunched over a keyboard. In my case, I switched to a standing desk to save my spine, and then back to a seated position to alleviate the stiffness in my knees! And fair point about the fantasy world building as well, a subject about which I know very little. Like everything else, if it’s done well it demands careful construction.