Isabel Cañas on speed-drafting a novel

Plus, awards-eligible stories for 2022.

Hello friends,

Happy November! How many of you are doing NaNoWriMo? If you are, write me back and let me know what strategies are working for you. And if you’re not, write back anyway so we can commiserate.

NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in one month, usually by writing 1,667 words per day. I am not doing it, thank you. But in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, today I want to talk about a great free resource on how to write a novel super fast: novelist Isabel Cañas’s newsletter post “How to Write the Thing (Fast) Part I.” (Cañas’s newsletter has since moved to TinyLetter.)

Also: It’s awards season! I’ve published a number of awards-eligible stories this year. My eligibility post is linked below.

News

I published three short stories in 2022. If you’re nominating for the Locus, the Nebula, the Hugo, or the Stoker, please consider adding them to your ballot! Read my awards eligibility post here, where I talk about these stories and where to find them.

My essay “Nostalgia, But Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game As Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming sometime in 2023.

My horror-leaning Shakespearean sonnet, “Ophelia After Her Distress,” will be published in Shakespeare Unleashed in April 2023 or thereabouts.

Isabel Cañas’s “How to Write the Thing (Fast) Part I: Preparation”

You might have heard of Cañas’s debut novel, The Hacienda, which came out earlier this year. I know I saw buzz about it everywhere, not to mention the gorgeous cover:

What you might not know is that Cañas writes super fast. She can write a whole novel draft in six weeks. (!) And in her newsletter, she tells you how to do it.

Full disclosure: I’m a total evangelist for her process. I tested it on my Pitch Wars novel, and it was a gamechanger for me: I had the initial novel idea in March 2021, started drafting on July 15, completed the draft on September 15, and submitted it to Pitch Wars on September 30.

You should 100% skip over to her newsletter (which has since moved to TinyLetter) and read the full post, and subscribe while you’re at it, but here’s a quick summary of how she breaks the process down:

STEP ONE. Brainstorming, idea-mining, note-dumping. Thousands and thousands of words. Everything you know or can think of about an idea, piled into one document.

(I’m in the middle of this note-dumping phase right now. To be honest, I feel like I’ve been in it for months; sometimes I feel like I’ll never move out of it! But I’ve spent most of my writing years training myself to start projects and then finish them and then move on to different things, which is a valuable skillset, to be sure, but I’m beginning to feel like in order to grow as a writer, I also need to slow down. The marination process is key. The pots need time to simmer away on the back burner, whether or not you’re hungry to eat what’s inside. If the stuff isn’t cooked yet, it isn’t cooked yet. Don’t rush it.)

STEPS TWO AND THREE. Cañas runs her main character(s) through the guidelines in Lisa Cron’s Story Genius (which I wrote about in September). And she runs her plot through Jessica Brody’s book Save the Cat Writes a Novel, which I have on hold at the library, actually, and will undoubtedly be writing about soon. Then...

STEP FOUR. She makes a graph that includes the beats from both Save the Cat Writes a Novel and Story Genius, and she makes the story fit that graph. In her own words:

As I put together my plot graph, I can actually see the whole story from a bird’s eye view. I find holes I didn’t anticipate. I realize arcs are misaligned or imbalanced. I can see which characters are superfluous, or can be combined with other side characters. I can see when subplots begin in the wrong places, or if they must be streamlined/thrown out. If I sense that the action of the climax is off, I tweak it to better echo the main character’s arc.

These are all problems that, if they appeared in a complete novel draft, would be enormously difficult to fix. Sometimes fatally so. One might have to chuck out the last 40k and rewrite it, or even start again.

Because of the plot graph, I am able to fix 80% of these Achilles’s heel problems before I write a single sentence.

This, by the way, is the thing that convinced me I should give her process a shot.

STEP FIVE is dividing the thing into chapters – which, I’m gonna be honest, I skip – and then STEP SIX is writing a zero draft: a beat-by-beat document of everything that happens in the novel, so that when you sit down to draft the actual thing, all of the “thinking” work is already done. All you have to do now is write.

Like I said, I’m an evangelist. The other great thing about this process, I think, is how modular it is. I entirely skip her STEP FOUR AND A HALF (which I didn’t even put in the above write-up), and I leave Story Genius out of my plot graph, preferring to let that information about my protagonist simmer in my head. The zero draft is especially great. People always complain about how outlining sucks all the joy out of the thing – but when you’re writing the zero draft, you get to do that joyful part, the part where you’re carried along on the wave of your own ideas, figuring out what happens as you go, without ever getting stuck or bogged down in your own prose. I find this incredibly freeing!

I still can’t do the thing in six weeks, though. It takes me a little longer than that.