I don’t know about you but there are still 30 minutes left to go before National Novel Writing Month starts in my neck of the woods and for some time zones there are many hours left before the starting pistol. But instead of sitting here chomping at the bit like a lunatic, here are five useful things you can do in this time before you are allowed to start writing.

1. Pick out character names. Remember how I said not to bother naming your characters? Well that was because it’s a waste of time during the actual contest. But in the hours before the contest begins? Go for it! Pour over baby name sites and dictionaries for that really deep and symbolic name for your character. Then you’ll be all ready to go when the clock ticks midnight.
2. Outline the story (or just the first few chapters or paragraphs). If you haven’t already outlined your story, now is a great time to do it. Even if you have outlined your story, do a more detailed outline of just a single chapter. Outlining is a way to start writing without really writing so it lets you start your story without cheating.
3. Do some research. Were you toying with the idea of having your character be a fisherman? Do some quick research about the profession online. Not only will this save you the time of having to do it while you are writing, it will inspire you so you’ll be in a better place to start the second the contest official starts. Also, you may find out details you never even thought of incorporating that will inform your future plot choices.
4. Tell someone about your story. Relative, significant other, complete stranger or whoever happens to be in earshot, tell them everything you have so far with your story. Even if you don’t have much, simply talking your story aloud is a great way to give yourself more ideas and start to work through the plot without actually writing a word. Sometimes your listener can also give you great ideas on where to go next if you are stuck.
5. Write…something else. A blog post. A really long email. A school paper. Do some writing that has nothing whatsoever to do with your novel. Even if it’s unrelated (and even if it isn’t fiction) it will get the pen moving and your creative juices flowing so that you are in the right mindset when the clock actually ticks over and you can start your novel.

So, how are you spending your time before NaNo starts?

• Hillary’s Weekly Blog Digest for 2009-10-24 http://bit.ly/KgHE6
  (HillaryDePiano.com) #
• the random connections in my life: eBay to Sunshine to Cheez-it to Jim Cummings http://bit.ly/1DaV5G
  (HillaryDePiano.com) #
• Nice reviews of The Author and The Trading Assistant’s Assistant from GoodReads http://bit.ly/22XB1e
  (HillaryDePiano.com) #
• My National Novel Writing Month newbie/first timer pep talk #nanowrimo http://bit.ly/4AX8Q
  (HillaryDePiano.com) #
• My 12 Step Guide for Succeeding at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) http://bit.ly/2dZOPg
  (HillaryDePiano.com) #
• Jim Cummings News: Week in Review (2009-10-30) http://bit.ly/EFTIZ
  (Cult of Cummings) #
• Jim Cummings News: Week in Review (2009-10-30) http://bit.ly/49wsDv
  (Cult of Cummings) #
• The Dumbo’s Circus Halloween Special http://bit.ly/2oQwmV
  (Cult of Cummings) #
• Interestingly, I have discovered my second draft while mercilessly hacking up my first http://bit.ly/46vsOB
  (HillaryDePiano.com) #
• Twitter Lists: If I can’t tweet about them, can I blog about them instead? http://bit.ly/44lmCc
  (The Whine Seller) #

When I am writing a first draft, I have a very strict Re-Read Nothing policy. This applies to fiction as well as blog posts and emails. Just get it all down, that’s my philosophy and then re-read later. I adopted this because, otherwise, I get all caught up in rewriting while I work and it makes the slog to the end much harder.

That said, some of my first drafts come out surprisingly well. But, of course, not all of them do.

There is this most exciting Young Adult Novel Contest going on. You can read about it here.

But, for this contest, you may submit *only* your title and the first 250 words of your book. That’s it.

250 words is very short. It is a tall order to impress anyone in 250 words.

So I took a look at the first bits of Old Novel and Mistress Novel and both don’t give you any sense of the project as a whole. I was discouraged and decided to write the first 250 words to Entirely New Novel I was planning on starting when the first two were done and submit that for the contest.

Then, at midnight, after promising to my husband I would be to bed “in a minute” I took a look at Mistress Novel. Chapter 1 was just shy of 500 words but really did end on something of a bang. “In a minute” has come to mean “between 4 and 5 AM” around here so I decide to do a little work on it. I had literally not read any of the words since I got them down in the first place so it’s something of a mess.

I decided to start hacking at it. We are talking weedwacker, nothing sacred hacking. Words were flying left and right and the delete key was smoking. I told myself this was just the “contest version” of the opening and that I could put everything else back in later so I was much more brutal than I would normally be. Anything that wasn’t vitally essentially to the scene was chopped out.

So as the dust settled, I laid down my chisel and looked at the smaller statue I had made out of the larger one. I got the entire first chapter down to *less than* 250 words.

Now, it wasn’t finished, not by a long shot, but it was a start and I decided to leave it alone overnight and ask my husband what he thought in the morning. This way, if it was total crap, I wouldn’t waste anymore time on it but, if it had potential, the chisel and I could go back at it.

But as I copied and pasted it into the email for my husband to read, something…uncomfortable occurred to me.

The hacked up version was pretty good. In fact, in a lot of ways, it’s much much better than the original. It moves faster, it has less distractions, less nonsense. Sure, version one has a bit more character development and some people like that sort of thing but version two is much more exciting, fast paced and cleaner.

This kind of bothers me.

My “editing” (if that is what we are going to call this based on results) was nothing more that psychotic, remorseless hacking up of what I wrote with nothing in mind other than the 250 word limit. Is that really what I need to do to get a good second draft? Does the fact that this version works on its own mean that I cannot add back in anything from the original? How much can you hack something down to the bare bones before it becomes too much?

Now that I think of it, I do believe Stephen King recommended this very process in editing, simply focusing on reducing the word count, and, while I have been doing massive editing on my Old Novel, none of it approached this kind of slash and burn.

Not sure what, exactly I am going to do with this knowledge in the future but it is a sort of discouraging conclusion to reach right before NaNoWriMo. No one ever likes to realize that over half of what one writes can be cut with no ill effects.