On Chuck Wendig's "30 Days in the Word Mines"
And other tools for NaNoWriMo.
Hello friends,
Happy October!
Last month, I read a goofy, spooky book called Black River Orchard, by a guy called Chuck Wendig. It was about haunted apples, and it was pretty ridiculous, and I read it in like two days.
I like Chuck’s books. I’ve read probably half a dozen of them, which is kind of shocking to realize considering he’s not one of my all-time favorite authors or anything. I think of his books as “modern pulp”: they’re a little gonzo and extremely fast-paced, and the writing style goes down smooth. If you’ve heard of Chuck, it’s probably because he wrote some Star Wars books, but I think his best novel is The Book of Accidents, a multiverse novel set in the greater Philadelphia area. (I tweeted about TBoA when it came out in 2021 – back when I still had Twitter; by the way, I haven’t missed Twitter AT ALL – and someone replied, “Yes! We NEED more Bucks County-centric horror!” Do we???)
Anyway, Chuck also runs a writing blog called Terribleminds, which I used to read a lot back in 2015. It has a lot of decent basic how-to-write-fiction posts, like this one or this one, and it’s a good resource if you’re just getting started, as I feel I was at the time, despite the bachelor’s degree in creative writing that I had just spent four years on.
Chuck has also written some creative writing books. One of these books is called 30 Days in the Word-Mines. It’s a great book for someone who wants to get started writing a novel but feels intimidated about where to begin. And given that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is almost upon us, I thought it would be fitting to talk about today!
I also have a few other little resources for anyone who wants to smash out a high word count in a short period of time without really knowing what they’re doing.
News
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 in autumn 2023, hypothetically.
My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette and Gender in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in 2024 or thereabouts.
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NaNoWriMo, and Chuck Wendig’s 30 Days in the Word-Mines
NaNoWriMo is National Novel-Writing Month.
On the off-chance that you’re not familiar with this: The idea is that you write 1,667 words per day every day for the 30 days of November. At the end, you have 50,000 words, which is the length of a very short novel, like The Great Gatsby or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Honestly, good luck trying to sell a novel that length in today’s market, but I digress.
For what it’s worth, I never succeed at NaNoWriMo. The closest I’ve ever come was 2018, when I was working on my MFA thesis novel. That year I managed 46,157 words, which is, of course, still not 50k. That’s OK! I finished the novel draft in December! It was fine! Words are words!
If you want to play, NaNo has a whole free website here, with a word-count tracker, community chat spaces, and listings of regional events. For word-count tracking, I myself prefer Pacemaker, which recalculates your daily word count based on what you’ve already done. And Chuck’s 30 Days in the Word Mines is mostly aimed at folks who are going into their novel draft completely blind, but if you want to outline first and then machete through your word count, I suggest Isabel Cañas’s “How to Write the Thing (Fast)” method, which I covered last year.
But maybe you are saying, “But Mary, I just found out about this and it’s already October 26, for Christ’s sake. I don’t have time to do an outline. But I still kind of want to do NaNo because it sounds like fun.” In that case, 30 Days in the Word Mines is for you!
The book is part motivational speeches – e.g. “Club your self-doubt to death with a claw hammer,” which is how Chuck writes – part prompts, like “Today, play with pacing,” and part rumination on the act of writing in general. It’s very much designed for people who don’t know what they’re doing, who don’t know a whole lot yet about the act of creative writing, and who are nevertheless blasting their way through the new and daunting activity that is making things up and writing them down.
The motivation and prompts are also good if you want to try writing a novel really fast and it’s not November. I do appreciate speed when working on a book; I think that momentum and immersiveness can carry you a long way toward the finish line. Besides, writing something down in the first place is usually, especially for a beginner, a lot harder than fixing it, and so by bulldozing your way through a first draft, you’re already 75% of the way there.
30 Days in the Word Mines is probably not for you if you are a more experienced writer, or one who doesn’t feel the need for little tips or motivation. It also may not be for you if writing a long-form draft in 30 days doesn’t sound like a fun time! If you’re looking for something slower, may I also suggest Chuck’s “simple no-fuckery writing plan”: 5 days a week, 350 words a day, for one year. And may I also suggest an outline.
Are you doing NaNoWriMo this year? Email me back or let me know in the comments!