Like many, I am a big fan of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, especially The Reckoners, a gritty superhero series that takes place in this world where only villains get superpowers. I loved the original trilogy to pieces, so when a spin-off was announced back in 2017, I was super hyped. But by the end of 2018, it was a much different story. The book had been canceled. Sanderson just couldn’t make it work.
I remember being shocked. What did he mean the book wasn’t coming out? He had written drafts! There was cover art! Plus, the idea of needing to scrap a book entirely seemed almost amateurish. Sure, I have many novels, including a complete trilogy that will never make it off of my hard drive. But those were all written before I published Red and Black. Don’t you eventually become experienced enough to prevent trainwrecks like this?
Flash forward to November 2020 to me hunched over my laptop working on the sixth Red and Black book. It was, of course, National Novel Writing Month, the time of the year where I thrive the most as a writer. 2020 was my tenth NaNoWriMo, and I had yet to encounter a loss. In fact, not only did always I manage to bang out 50,000 words, but I usually completed the entire novel with days to spare. But 2020 was different. I was getting in my words every day, but something was very, very wrong.
Despite having plotted much of the novel out in advance, Red and Black 6 had problems. This includes several false starts, and while there are a few genuinely exciting set pieces, the vast majority of the book is just the characters feeling defeated and talking about how they have no idea how they’re going to face the challenges in front of them.
Basically, being passive as fuck.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think your characters need to be super proactive in every second of the book. We all have times when we are paralyzed by the lack of options in front of us, and there are structurally appropriate moments for characters to go through this too.
It is not structurally appropriate for those moments to take up the majority of the book. Especially when that book is a superhero story. I knew that I was in trouble long before I limped across the 50k finish line. I may have “won” NaNoWriMo, but I had done it with an utterly unusable book.
The question was, why?
One of the answers is probably obvious: the pandemic. November of 2020 was a pretty scary time. No vaccines had been made available yet. Families were facing the reality of much smaller, or even solo, Thanksgivings and Christmases. I lost a family member, and I was far from the only one. It was fitting to write a book where the characters felt like they didn’t have a lot of options in front of them. None of us did.
This might distract someone from writing, but the crazy thing was that it wasn’t like that for me, at least not initially. As COVID-19 made its way from China to the United States, I found myself turning back to an unfinished series of fairy tale novellas that became my Twin Kingdoms series. When I was furloughed from my job, I buried myself in edits for the next Red and Black book. In a world where every norm was being stripped away, fiction became a realm of comforting predictability. I couldn’t control the national death toll, but my books were another thing entirely.
But that wasn’t the only thing I was juggling.
At the tail end of September, one of my cats needed to be rushed to the vet due to a urinary blockage. This led to a lengthy hospital stay, several surgeries, vet bills, and a difficult recovery period at home. I usually spend a large chunk of October preparing for NaNoWriMo, but with all the rushing around, that time was cut dramatically short. The prepwork I did manage was spent sitting on the floor next to a drugged-up cat who couldn’t understand all of the trauma he had just experienced to keep him alive.
And then November first happened, the day when I usually wake up early to get in my first 2000 words. Instead, I spent the entire day was crying my eyes out.
It’s not worth getting into the specifics of why my marriage fell apart. I’ve already written about it, and this blog post is already too damn long. But while it’s been as amicable a divorce as possible and my former spouse and I remain very close, the day we separated was not an easy one, and the rest of NaNoWriMo was basically the same. Writing was no longer an escape for me. Writing was hard. It didn’t matter that I had done this nine times before. It didn’t matter that I had published multiple books. My life had hit a level of stress where I just couldn’t expect to produce like I had when I was happy or even just overwhelmed by the pandemic.
The book was doomed.
One of the most common pieces of advice for authors, “write every day.” It’s one I take seriously, even if sometimes my “writing time” is spent on more administrative tasks rather than the act of writing itself. It’s almost a necessity to those of us who are authors with a day job. We so rarely have large chunks of time to dedicate to our stories. And when you do something every day for years, it becomes a part of your routine and then a part of your identity. I write because I want to share my stories, but I also write because I need to. So when the writing fails, it feels like I am a failure too.
So much of the language around National Novel Writing Month is based on the concepts of habits and routines. And that’s for a good reason. One of the best ways to tackle a seemingly overwhelming goal is to chop it into manageable chunks. But it also makes the process cold and mechanical when writing can be a very emotional act.
Writers are more than just book-making machines. Acting as if the traumas of the wider world and our personal lives do not impact our ability to create is delusional. Every burden we experience leaves a weight on our shoulders. And while writing can be a fitting distraction or release, there’s only so much weight you can bring to the keyboard until everything gets poisoned. And it doesn’t matter how experienced or professional you may think you are. Sometimes books fail.
It’s now October 2021, and I am once again facing National Novel Writing Month. This year I am returning to Red and Black 6 with hopes of completely rewriting it from scratch. The story is very different. The characters are more active all around, someone who was slated to die doesn’t even show up in the book, and my protagonist, Dawn, has a much stronger emotional arc.
Part of me worries that I will once more fail. That I’ll get to the keyboard on day one, and all of my careful plans will fall apart. Because while the world looks different than it did a year ago, on both a personal and global level, things still aren’t great. But it has not been a purposeless year. I have struggled, but I have also produced works that I am proud of (including that series of fairy tales I mentioned!). I attend regular therapy sessions, which is not an easy thing for me. I have learned to take time for myself to unwind (albeit not without guilt). And I honestly believe that I have a stronger story in me this time around.
And ironically, one of the books I have been reading while plotting this out is Lux by Brandon Sanderson and Steven Bohls, a brand new Recokners novel. Not the same book that Sanderson initially talked about writing back in 2017, but something different. 2020’s NaNoWriMo may have been a failure, but that doesn’t mean that the book that grows out of it has to be.
Wish me luck.
Nancy O'Toole 