A minor character decides to take a more prominent role: welcome Sarah.

Introductions
If my name sounds familiar, it's because Sarah is a common name. If Sarah Bidanjiri sounds familiar, well it's either because you know me - since Bidanjiri is not a common last name - or because you have an excellent memory and have seen my name in the past NaNoWriMo U of A Edition's first week word counts. Since the advice of those who have actually completed a novel in a month seem to all say that one of the keys to success is to be committed, I decided that, among other things, I should become more active in the whole process which would entail joining in on the blog. From what I can tell, the only person I know here is Steve (aside from a few of my fellow drop-outs). On the theme of commitment, I also decided to write up my own Magna Cartas; and after some encouragement from Steve and trading of lists, I thought it would be interesting to know what made up other people's lists. So I'll begin, in the hope that I don't end up being the only one to do so here:

Magna Carta I: (What I LIKE in novels)
Well-developed / dynamic /likeable characters
Wit & humour
Travel
Adventure & action
Meanings / subtle messages in story
Stories that make you laugh & cry (or just laugh)
Moral dilemmas
Hope
Thought provoking
Believable
Poetry
A sense of mysticism / mystery
True friendship (& sometimes love)
Quirky characters
Lots of dialogue
Eloquent language (though not in excess)
Cultural elements
Beautiful lanscape / setting
New ideas
A glimpse into humanity
Engaging
Perseverance (stolen from Steve's list)

Magna Carta II: (What I DON'T LIKE in novels)
Stereotypical characters
Preachy messages
Depressing / hopeless stories
Teenage drama
Overly graphic with sex & violence (though there are some exceptions, if it truly helps the plot along)
Purposeless plot (I will have to get over that for NaNoWriMo)
Quick wrap-up endings
Dysfunctional families
Impossibly perfect & unbelievable characters
Long scenery & war descriptions
Writing that gives you a headache (where reading is overly difficult...)
Self-absorbed / un-thoughtful protagonists (with no redeeming qualities)
Cheesy scenes
Cliffhanger endings (with obvious intention of a sequel)
Overly predictable plot

"I'd like to encourage the rest of you to do the same at some point, whether or not you're taking part this year." - Steve Smith

Alright Steve, I suppose I'll weigh in on the whole "advice" subject.

First of all, a bit about me: My name is Adam and I am a two-time U of A NaNoWriMo winner. My first novel was titled Broken Wings and the second one was titled Al's War. I have no "training" or "credentials" when it comes to writing. I was a subpar university student at best. During the writing of both my novels, I was employed full-time. Why am I telling you this? Because if a dope like me can do it, and was able to find the time to do it, then it should be fairly easy for anyone. The only thing is you need to be stubborn enough to see it through to the end.

1) Follow Steve and Jake's advice. It's all good stuff and helped me a lot during my first attempt (except Jake's bit about being unemployed, but it does help.) Even the stuff they wrote during their failed second attempts in 2007 helped me avoid some of the pitfalls past NaNoWriMo winners experience during my own second attempt. Amanda, Daniel and Chris also make some good points.

2) Don't sweat the mid-month doldrums. Know this: your first and last seven days of the month will be your most productive. In the second and third weeks, you will notice that your productivity will crater and you will begin to despair. This is normal. During the first week, you have a bunch of fresh ideas and are motivated by the fact that this novel attempt has gone further than any previous attempt. After this, you will begin to compile a mental list of all the things you would rather do than write your novel. Believe me: this list will be quite long.

3) Don't restart. Ever. If you so much as delete one written word during the month, shame on you for not knowing the meaning of a first draft novel. Even if you hate your plot and all your characters, there are ways around this. Make them suffer. Kill them off. Do something creative that doesn't involve a reduction in your word count. You'll be much better off. During NaNoWriMo, you will come up with a lot of ideas you would rather write than the one you're currently working on. Put them out of your mind because they will tempt you and drive you crazy.

4) Don't go in thinking that even if you don't finish your novel by the end of the month, you have a good start and you can always finish your novel at some other time. It's as simple as this: if you're not motivated enough to finish the thing in one month, then you never will. Your novel will sit in your documents folder for all eternity, never to be seen or heard from again.

5) Keep track of your daily word count, even the days when you accomplish no writing at all. I used a spreadsheet which calculated how many words were left, and the number of words I needed to write per day in order to finish on time. This allowed me to see just how far behind I was falling and kept my sense of urgency at a high enough level.

6) Write about what you know. It's common sense, but it seems common sense is not all that common. In Broken Wings, my protagonist was a pilot and a football player, which I know a fair bit about. In Al's War, my protagonist and I shared the same occupation, but he was also a hockey goalie who takes a trip to Australia. At the time, I knew nothing about playing goalie(or very much about playing hockey at all...) and hardly anything about Australia, so I spent far too much time researching both subjects. As a result, I fell way behind in my writing. If you must write about something you know nothing about, just make stuff up. For example, Steve had Department of Oceans and Fisheries vehicles with lights and sirens on them, simply because his story needed them to.

Advice from Africa

I completed a novel the first time and totally failed the second time. Mr. Samuel has kindly pointed out why I failed the second time. So here's some advice. From a girl who can waste a month on 50,000 useless words too.

And I am writing from Africa, by the way - this is the last few minutes of my last day at work before I wing back to the winter wonderland that is Edmonton. Haven't decided if I'm going to sign up this year (because if I do commit, I'm finishing, dammit).

On motivation
This is the most important part of the NaNoWriMo puzzle. Absolute, fanatical, insomnia-inducing drive to succeed at a hopelessly inane task.
This absolutely is a competition, and don't let anyone tell you differently.
A much better way to motivate yourself to continue than the silly self-motivational tools that Steve advocates is to choose someone arbitrary (preferably someone who will write THOUSANDS of words in the first 10 days). And resolve to beat them.
Once that person quits (and he/she will) you will have invested far too much misery to give up without wasting part of your soul.
You can also use such rivalries as plot points. Just add a zeppelin and give your opponent a moustache. That worked in my first novel (only it was a spaceship and a very, very painstakingly described and painstakingly boring physical description), but not in my second (see 'On Characters').


On Plot
Have one. Deviate from it often. If it doesn't work, invite god into the machine by having something catastrophic happen and then spend some time fixing it. That will be interesting for you (as you won't know what happens next and will actually have to explore causality) and will help your word count. The wilder the tangent, the faster 50,000 words becomes possible.

On Tangents
Having them seems to be universal NaNoWriMo advice (UofA style, anyway), but I don't see much helpful about what a good tangent looks like.
Actually, that's not true, I see all kinds of great advice - it's just not called 'tangents'
Basically, if you seem to be grinding to a halt, switch gears.
Write a character inventory. Invent a new system of magic. Invent a backstory for a character that was lacking one up to then and flash back to it. Leap sideways into a totally unrelated (and torrid - it's better if it's torrid) love affair.
Pick up the life story of a stock character (like the taxi driver or the guy selling wands or the drug dealer who just walked past you) and run with it for a while (that's one of my favorites - I use it with annoying verve).
Describe the scenery or the contents of some woman's wardrobe. If you're not committed enough to do that, insert italic asides about how some other book that you are rumoured to have abridged did that, complete with smartass remarks on how "satire" and "boring" were apparently the same thing 'back in the day.'
Introduce a Monty Python-esque narrator and fill pages with witty commentary on what's happened so far.
Or an action scene. These can, of course, be related to the plot, but even if they're not, Dan's right. Nothing wastes words like having two guys swing swords at each other (at least I think it was Dan...).

You know, whatever. No one said it had to be a good book.
On Characters
Do not love your characters. Use them. If you grow attached to your characters, it becomes difficult to do interesting things to them, and your word count slowly diminishes as you begin to realize that your characters are either boring or interesting enough that you have ethical qualms about screwing up their all-too-fictional lives.

On Writing Mechanics
They simply don't exist. Run-on sentences, frequent-tense switching and accidental non-sequitors are all part of the fun. Don't sweat it. Just let the words pour forth.


NaNoWriMo 2.0
I don't doubt that annoying your friends via facebook status updates is a great motivator (see 'On motivation' and Chris's advice. Setting yourself up for shame and loss works).
I boldly predict that twitter will work better. While you'll need to ride the fine line between wasting 140 characters that could have been in your novel and making use of this latest social media innovation, I say it's a line worth riding. You might just be inspired - and thousands of people can mock you in real time.

On Gloating
If you do finish, make sure Steve notices. pfft.

At the buzzer

Okay, firstly - I'm a NaNoWriMo aberration. I need to get that out of the way up front. In no way did last year's path to a completed novel resemble the one outlined in Chris Baty's (excellent) "No Plot, No Problem". He emphasizes pacing and establishing a routine for the month; I went into the final 40 hours with 19,000 written. Look at that number again. That means that I had to write approximately 775 words an hour for 40 consecutive hours. So my gigantic disclaimer ... and I cannot stress this enough ... I'm a moron and you shouldn't listen to anything I have to say.

Of course, I had a very potent motivational tool - a $10,000 penalty for failing to complete it. I would have been financially ruined if I was short on the word count. I created a FaceBook group entitled "Chris will give you $10 if he doesn't write 50,000 words in May," thinking that maybe a hundred or so of my friends would join. Well, I underestimated people's desire for free potential money (not to be confused with "potentially free money") by an order of magnitude. At its peak, I think the FaceBook group had around 1,019 people. I don't necessarily recommend this course of action, since it could end horrifically. However, if you need an extra source of motivation, then throwing yourself on the hook for a gigantic wad of cash is certainly an effective way of obtaining one.

In terms of actual novel-writing advice, I would offer the following three suggestions:

1.) Write in the genre that you most often read.
Writing in an unfamiliar genre might be more of a "challenge", but you've already got all the challenge you need with that whole 50,000-words-in-a-month thing. So resist the temptation to novelize Firefly if you're not a big sci-fi reader. That being said, using a genre in a fantastic way to build in some word count and add interesting plot elements. For example, I wrote a fantasy novel last year. As part of the backstory, I had to explain the system of magic that I employed. It was a fun little sidenote that used up some word count, and contributed to the creation of my alternate reality.

2.) Make stuff happen, then justify it.
This is a little bit of advice that I am borrowing from my improvisational theater buddies. The best way to advance a plot is to just do it. Jump in with both feet (oh my gosh! Zombies just attacked out of *nowhere*!), and then try to figure out a.) how to make it consistent with the events so far in your novel, and b.) the genuine reactions that your characters would have. It's far more interesting to reveal personality traits about one of your protagonists through actions rather than dialogue. Do they freeze up in terror when zombies attack? Do they retreat to a safe place and stock up on supplies? Do they grab the nearest shovel and hack away? You'll actually be surprised at how confidently you'll be able to definitively say, "Yes. This is how [Character X] would react in this situation." However, in order to get those insights, you've got to create circumstances that provoke interesting reactions.

3.) Focus on the characters you like.
Invariably, you're going to find that a character you've created just isn't that interesting. That's okay - you're not obligated to carry them through the end of the novel, even if they were the intended protagonist. Switch over to the perspective of a more interesting minor character and see how they fare in the spotlight for a while. Sometimes the minor characters can develop into ones with a lot of depth, especially the ones that start as caricatures that do something to break the mold of that caricature. By defying conventional expectations, the character will instantly becomes a little bit more intriguing for the reader (and, more importantly for NaNoWriMo, the writer).

4.) Don't leave the last 31,000 words to the last weekend. Again, I must stress - I am a moron and you shouldn't listen to anything I have to say.

NaNoWriMo U of A - Q&A

NaNoWriMo U of A? What's that?

It's short for National Novel Writing Month, University of Alberta edition. NaNoWriMo is an annual event in November in which participants attempt to write a fifty thousand word novel (each) in a month. In 2006, a few of us at the University of Alberta decided that we wanted to do this, but that November was pretty inconvenient for students. Accordingly, we conducted it in May (and did so again in 2007 and 2008). This year (i.e. 2009), we're going with June.

But I have nothing to do with the University of Alberta.

That's okay; we've had participants who weren't even in Canada. The name's retained more or less as a historical artifact.

Is it really possible to write an entire novel in a month?

Yes. By my count, the three NaNoWriMo U of As have produced twelve eleven completed novels by ten different novellists. And before you ask, several of these novellists were working full-time jobs (in at least one case, more than one job).

Are the novels any good?

Oh my, no.

What do I get if I succeed?

You get to tell everybody that you've written a novel (note that, according to NaNoWriMo's official rules, you must refer to your completed novel as "My most recent novel").

Is this a competition?

Only against yourself. If you write fifty thousand words, you win. If not, not.

This sounds stupid...

Yes.

...and yet I would like to know more.

The best thing to do would be to get hold of a copy of the official NaNoWriMo guide, Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!, which can be purchased from Amazon using the link on the sidebar (or from another bookseller if you think Amazon is homophobic). You could also check out the official NaNoWriMo site, also linked on the sidebar.

You can also check out this blog's archives. Here are some especially useful posts:

Excerpts from above-named official guide, posted in flagrant violation of copyright laws (though morally justified in my mind given the repeated flogging of the book that I do)

Turning Close Friends into Obligations
The Magna Cartas

Advice from previous NaNoWriMo U of A winners

Steve Smith
Daniel Kaszor
Jake Troughton
Chris Samuel
Amanda Henry

Okay, I'm in. What now?

First, notify me by e-mail (sarcasticidealist at gmail dot com - have spammers really not developed bots that recognize that form of writing an e-mail address?) that you're in. Then, on June 1, start writing a damned novel.