In 2018, I entered National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and won. Winning does not mean I beat the other entrants. It is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, and I did it (75,100 words). I have signed up to do it again this year, and I am feeling both excitement at writing something new (my first new novel since NaNoWriMo last year), and trepidation over whether I can make the story work. The idea for this novel, The Keeper, is from 2014. I started on it a few times in the past, but could never get past the opening scenes. It begins with a man depressed to the point of being suicidal, but who fears the impact of his suicide on his children. So he decides to get himself murdered.
At first, I set the novel in the rural southwestern U.S. (in my wife’s hometown), but it did not seem dangerous enough. Plus, I had never lived there, so I did not know the setting intimately enough (although my wife could help with the characters and the flow of life there.) So I switched to the South Side of Chicago, where I lived years ago, a city that has no shortage of murders. But I realized I would need to write parts of the novel in a young, urban U.S. vernacular, and living in Japan, I did not think I could find the help to pull it off. So I set it in urban Tokyo, but faced the problem of the city being far too safe. I think I have solved the problem now, but certainty will come with writing. So far I have only notes and a short tag line: “What’s it take to get yourself murdered in Tokyo? Pretty damn much.”
Last year I started my NaNoWriMo novel two weeks early, but by the last days of November, with the 20,000 words I had written in October, I was 90,000 words in and running out of story. So this year I decided not to start the novel until November 1. If beginning The Keeper turns out to be difficult, as it did before, I will just have to push through it. The novel has been in my head too long and it’s time to get it into my computer.
With five novels written, I have no doubts about being able to produce 50,000 words. And from winning NaNoWriMo last year, I know I can write the requisite number of words each day for a month. The question is whether I will have time to do all the other things that November will require of me.