# No Secret Sauce

I have participated in NaNoWriMo every year since 2003 except two where I knew I would not be able to commit. In all those years (18, I guess, if Math is with me), I have gone in expecting to be able to keep up the 1667 words per day that are expected if one wants to be in the winner circle on the other side of 50000 words. Of those 18 swings of the bat, I have managed to complete my novel three times, and only two within the allotted 30 days. The last one, an incredibly ambitious hand-written book, took me to the days before the next NaNoWriMo to finish, though I did finish it, having written all 50000+ words by hand.

I've done all sorts of different things to try and get ready for NaNo. The books I'm happiest with have been planned to a certain extent, either extensively, like with the hand-written Book of Rogues in 2015/2016, which is the first of a seven-book series (or the first of a one-and-a-half-book series if what I have actually written is any indication), or a little planned, like the first book I finished for NaNo in 2007, which was the second book in that series, or completely by the seat of my pants like Wilberforce and Shuttle, which I finished in 2013.

Clearly, the amount of planning that I do or don't do doesn't affect the likelihood of my success.

Among the failed books are some that I gave up on right away, not able to find something in what I'd written to make me excited enough to continue. But there were some, like the book about the football coach, or the one I tried for NaNo in THREE different years, that I was really excited and enthusiastic about. The last time with that one, I got a late start because I spent some time trying to write a different story, and I got to about halfway, then my wrists gave up. That was the last time I tried writing anything with a non-split keyboard. My hands hurt for weeks after that. I had an awesome rhythm, I knew where the story was going, my hands gave up, and I didn't write anything until the next year's NaNo, another story I was excited about about a contractor who investigated cases of disappearance through the Rapture to find out if they were genuine or an attempt to dodge creditors. I gave up on that one within three days. I was super excited about the story, but I just couldn't find a mechanism to deliver the story that I knew was in there. Probably a story for another day, if I can find that "in". Wilberforce and Shuttle was a story that I was a little interested in, but I didn't have strong ties to it. I was definitely more interested in the next books in the series that I was writing, but they didn't make it to the end, and W&S did.

Clearly initial level of interest isn't the way to gauge the chance of finishing either.

The two times I completed NaNoWriMo within November, I did have a relatively stable work situation. I wasn't running out of contract, I wasn't looking for work, and the jobs I had at those times weren't especially overwhelming with responsibility. In fact, I would say that in both cases, I was comfortable. The time that I won NaNo but it took just about 12 months is a lot like the other times. I was employed in a long-term situation, I was able to put my work away at the end of the day (for the most part), and I felt like I could expend some extra concentration toward keeping the story in the front of my brain.

There have been other years when I've been that comfortable, and sometimes downright bored, but it appears that there might be something there. It might not be employment situation or anything like that. Instead, it might be the ability to keep coming back to the story; to keep it in the active brain.

There have been a couple of times in the weeks leading up to this year's NaNoWriMo where I've let the idea of the story kind of fall away. I lost motivation, and I stopped thinking of it as something that I was definitely going to do. I remember that feeling in a lot of the years that I've given up. A lot like how some of the other writing challenges I've set myself have gone, in fact. A day goes by without writing, and then another, and then a week, and then the challenge is over, and I haven't even really given it a shot.

So what's the secret? I still don't know, but I think a good strategy would probably be to not have ADHD. Barring that, what I'm going to do is try to stay in it. To try and keep part of my brain on the story, on the two good characters I've got in mind for this, and to not have too many expectations about the way the story is going to go.

I'm not so prolific that I need to find a new way to keep myself interested, but I'm also not getting paid for this, so I can play around with the idea of a story starting with characters and really nothing else. I'll need to find some way to keep myself coming back, and if that's by leaving every writing session on a cliffhanger, or by revealing some startling insight about Ryall or Lem that I feel I absolutely need to dig into in the next session, then that's fine. Better than fine, it almost sounds like a formula for NaNoWriMo success.

Two more days!

Liam