First round is right here.

The rules are simple:

Look through the 200-word entries from last week.

Pick one.

Add another 200 words to the story.

(Easiest way forward is to copy the chosen 200 words to your own blog, then add the next 200. Don’t forget to link to your now 400-word story in the comments. Someone may want to continue the tale next week, for part three.)

You do not need to have participated in the first round to participate in this one.

Do not choose your own 200 words, because, c’mon.

Do not finish the story. This is a five-part fiction experiment: we’ll end the year with several 1000-word stories, each built out of 200-word chunks by you guys. This is a collaborative game. It is Whisper Down the Lane. It is Telephone. It should be very interesting by the end. One hopes.

You’ve got one week.

Due by Friday, December 6th, noon EST.

Join the narrative chain.

Me: The time has come.

Me: Hello?

Me: Oh, Cripes.

*looks around the room*

*searches house*

*sends sentient drone flights*

You: HEY ALL RIGHT GET THESE TERMINATOR PLANES OUT OF MY ASS

Me: They’re not really in your ass. That’s a metaphor.

You: Well, one of them gave me a hemmorhoid. “Metaphorically.”

Me: Whatever. It’s time to come out of hiding. You don’t have to be scared.

You: Listen, we’re done. For me and soon everybody else, NaNoWriMo is NEARLY over, dude. That’s it. You can go. Your job here? Completed. Well-done. Round of applause. Now go away. Jerk.

Me: Captain Howdy, that isn’t very nice!

You: Ugh, blergh. Whaddya want?

Me: I want to talk next steps.

You: We talked next steps yesterday.

Me: No, there I threatened to kick your face into various shapes if you carpet bombed the publishing industry with your explosively-unfinished prose. Today I want to talk about the real next steps. I want to talk about editing. After all, January is NaEdYoShiMo.

You: Is that Japanese?

Me: No. It means: National Edit Your Shit Month.

You: OH YOU AND YOUR PERSISTENT VULGARITY.

Me: It’s in my genes, man. Get up close and personal with my DNA you see fuck and bastard and cockwaffle etched upon the helical chains, carved into the hydrogen bonds.

You: Okay, wait, so, if January is NaEdYoShiMo month, what is December?

Me: NaEscYoManMo.

You: National… Escargot Yo-Yo… Mantis Month?

Me: That makes so little sense it might be a heretical utterance used to summon a Great Old One. Nay, December is National Escape Your Manuscript Month.

You: It’s not chasing me. It’s not a swamp monster.

Me: Well, herein lies my first piece of advice: do not jump right from writing a book to editing a book if you can help it. We writers are the worst judges of our own work, particularly when we’re very close to it. Think about it. You’ve just gone ten rounds in the ring with this pugilist and while you won the fight, you’re beat to hell. Your head’s swollen like a cantaloupe. Your nose is streaming blood. The piss, shit, hell and fuck have all been knocked out of you. Now isn’t the time for a cold and clinical examination of how the fight went. Now’s time to sit down. Ice your big melon head. Pinch your nose to stop the bleeding. Step out of the ring and stay out of the ring.

You: While I admit I’m kinda afraid to edit, I’m also afraid to wait. It’s a scab I wanna pick. A broken tooth I wanna wiggle. IT’S A BEAR I GOTTA POKE.

Me: Right now, though, your creative wires are all crossed. You’ll hate stuff unfairly. You’ll love other passages unreasonably. You’ll despise stuff that works and adore things that don’t. Your brain’s gone all wibbly-wobbly lovey-hatey. Look, when you read a book written by Some Other Asshole, you can usually get pretty clear pretty quick on what you liked and didn’t like. What worked and didn’t work. Because, who cares. Not your book. You need to get to that phase with your manuscript. You need to get to the stage where it reads like Some Other Asshole wrote it. So: take the month of December off. Besides: December is crazytown with the holidays. Christmas isn’t just one day anymore, it’s a whole month of shopping and songs and pie and —

*eats pie*

You: Did you just eat a whole pie while I’m sitting here?

Me: MMGPH– no.

You: I feel like I just watched a snake eat a cat. You have a gift, my friend. So, what else?

Me: Editing tips?

You: Lay ’em on me. I’m getting ready.

Me: Have a plan.

You: Like a Cylon?

Me: Yep. Like a Cylon. We like to imagine we edit a book the same way we write, but that’s not really true. Writing is lining up the pieces but editing is what we do to those pieces: we rearrange some, we throw a few away, we add a couple more, we destroy a few with a hammer, we cry on a few, we eat one, and we keep doing it until the arrangement is right. We also like to imagine that we’re going to tackle the whole thing in one go, but in my experience that’s rarely been the case. You can’t eat an elephant in one bite. Unless you’re Cthulhu.

You: Maybe I am Cthulhu.

Me: I know Cthulhu and you are no Cthulhu.

You: Jerk.

Me: Guilty. Anyway — to determine how you’re going to begin, it pays to get a sense first of what’s wrong. Which means reading the whole damn thing again. Just read it. Think about it. Take notes if you want to. What works? What doesn’t? Then, for me, I like to chart the book. I want to see its shape. Maybe that means re-outlining the book. Maybe that means taking new notes on the characters — identify their arcs in three or more beats. It could even mean literally drawing the shape of your story — is it really a simple Freytag’s triangle? Is it really three acts? Maybe it’s five. Or seven. Note the rise and fall of tension. Find the anagnorisis and peripeteia and the catastrophe that results. A lot of it is asking yourself questions.

You: Like, with what manner of fire should I burn this manuscript to ash?

Me: Ease off the mopey stick. No, I mean questions like, does the story move along fast enough? Do you get to the inciting incident quickly? Does the middle drag? Are all mysteries properly answers? Where are the plotholes and what will it take to spackle them over? Do the characters act believably, or do they feel enslaved to the plot? Does it all make sense? Writing the book, all you get is forest. Now you’re trying to see all the trees.

You: That’s a lot of questions.

Me: A book is a big thing. It’s not a concrete block. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine. Lots of moving parts big and small. Dongles and flywheels. Toothy gears turning larger gears turning larger gears still. A floppy dildo on a zipline strikes a boiling teapot which tips and brews a cup of tea whose weight disturbs the wolverine on which the teacup is perched and then the wolverine runs into the nearest Wal-Mart and — well, you see what I’m saying. Lots of mechanisms strung together. Character, plot, theme, tension, mystery, mood, emotional throughline, each piece affecting the other. You pick a part and then you wade into the fray with an axe for chopping, a scalpel for finer cutting, a paintbrush for erasing and flourishing, a pen to rewrite what you’ve lost — to fix what you’ve broken. And that doesn’t even account for the writing itself.

You: Oh, fuck me sideways with a Garden Weasel, there’s more –?!

Me: You bet your sweet baboons. Once you’ve actually gotten the story sussed out, then it’s time to attack the language. It’s time for the copy-edit. And there, again, language is a great big wacky machine and you’ll find yourself doing a lot of trimming, tightening, rewriting, firebombing. Lots of little things to look for, too.

You: Do I want to know?

Me: You do. Damn right you do. Here’ s a by-no-means-exhaustive list of stuff to look for. Ready?

You: No.

Me: Too bad. In no particular order, be on the hunt for: typos, misspellings, poor word choice, incorrect word choice, repeated words, awkward phrasing, run-on sentences, comma overuse, missing punctuation, repeated words, unnecessary adverbs, egregious dialogue tags, unnecessary adverbs connected to egregious dialogue tags, passive voice, lazy overuse of the verb ‘to be,’ junk words, trailing modifiers, broken subject-verb agreement, lack of parallel structure, busted-ass metaphors, broken rhythm, inconsistent word tense, inconsistent POV, fragments, shit that just doesn’t make sense, and so on, and so forth.

You: You said ‘repeated words’ twi — oh.

Me: Just making sure you’re listening.

You: That’s a lot of stuff. My head hurts.

Me: I can offer a few Stupid Writer Tricks to make it easier.

You: Lay it on me, Daddy.

Me: Don’t call me Daddy.

You: Mommy?

Me: Moving on. Tips: first, read your work aloud.

You: Like, theatrically?

Me: Mutter it for all I care. But speaking the story aloud allows you to catch things you might not “hear” while reading — after all, words on a page are simply proxy representations for the words we speak with our monkey mouths and also inside our own cave-like minds. Vocalizing your tale lets you listen for rhythm and flow. For speedbumps. For a loss of clarity. For redundancies.

You: What else?

Me: Look at the shape of the prose on the page. Uniformity is not your friend. If you turn the manuscript 90 degrees counter-clockwise, the prose should form mountains and valleys — peaks made of short, terse sentences coupled with hills of thicker, more robust text. Long sentences and short sentences make rhythm.  And the way you format your page matters, too.

You: I don’t follow.

Me: If you wrote the book in, say, 14-point Courier, change it to 12-point Times New Roman for the edit. Or print it out. Or adjust the margins. Shifting the physical parameters of your manuscript goes a good way toward making it feel like Some Other Asshole wrote it instead of you.

You: That’s genius.

Me: Thanks.

You: No, not you, I mean this funny list on Buzzfeed: “37 Shiba Inu That Look Like Tom Hiddleston Eating Bacon.” But your thing is genius too I guess.

Me: Uh. Th… thanks.

You: One more question. I’m told I should “kill my darlings.”

Me: That’s true.

You: My spouse and children and pets? I know a writing career takes sacrifices, but wow.

Me: What? No! No. Darlings inside the text. Which are sometimes erroneously described as parts of the work that you love unconditionally, which is really very bad advice. “Destroy what you love” is not good advice for storytelling. The darlings of your fiction are those things — be they passages, chapters, characters, whatever — that exist in the story only because you love them, not because they serve any purpose. They are precious. They are a bunch of peacocks whose only purpose is to preen and poop up your manuscript. Pretty. And shallow. Here’s an example of darling-murder from my own dubious writing career.

You: That helps.

Me: Excellent.

You: Fine. You’ve convinced me. I’ll take some time off. Then I’ll go edit.

Me: Stellar.

You: So, I guess we’re done here.

Me: Yeah. I guess we are. Tomorrow is Gorge Yourself On Big Dumb Birdmeat Day. NaNoWrimo crawls to a close over the weekend. So that’s it. That’s all she wrote. Congrats on finishing.

You: It wasn’t hard. I just wrote “poop” 50,000 times.

Me: That counts. It’s better than some novels I’ve read.

You: So, I won?

Me: Sure. Winning is kinda subjective, here. You might want to read this other thing I wrote about the idea of “winning and losing” when it comes to NaNoWriMo.

You: Yeah, no. I think I’m gonna go take a nap, instead.

Me: Fair enough.

You: Thanks for your help.

Me: Happy to oblige, Captain Howdy.

You: That’s that, then.

Me: It will be when the exorcist arrives.

You: A young priest and an old priest?

Me: Sounds like the start of a joke.

You: Yeah, well. What an excellent day for an exorcism, am I right? Now why don’t you come on over here and loosen these straps?

Me: Why don’t you make the straps disappear?

You: That’s much too vulgar a display of power, Wendig.

*vomits hell-barf*

You will note that I have a few items of Merch for sale here on the site.

This Merch tends to be of the “mug” and “t-shirt” variety.

I sell them using Zazzle.

And, hey, lookie lookie.

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You will get 50% off.

Also, if you’d like to see any other kind of merch on this site, lemme know, yeah? Anything from the site you’d like to see on a mug, t-shirt or Other Customizable Product, please plop down into the comments and say the word. Say thankee-sai.

Me: Hey, whatcha doing? Doodling more dongs on all my books? Because that’s mature.

You: No. For your information, I’m planning my next steps with this novel, since the month is almost over and I will soon be scoring a bullseye on the ol’ 50,000 words target. Boom.

Me: Congratulations to you.

You: Thank you. I plan on celebrating.

Me: And what manner of celebration are you planning?

You: You know, I’m a writer, so, the yoozh — I’ll sit around in a dark room drinking hard liquor and laughing at all my jokes until I start crying.

Me: That’s a myth, by the way. One I admittedly persist in transmitting, but all writers are not drunks. Hell, some authors don’t even drink.

You: HA HA HA, SURE, GRANDPA.

Me: *stares hot iron pokers through your soul*

You: Fine, I’ll amend my celebration. I seem to recall Delilah Dawson said something about cupcake cannons, so I’ll head down to Party City and grab a couple of those badboys and fire off a 21-cupcake-salute. Red velvet. Right into my deserving belly. CHOOM CHOOM.

Me: So, liquor and cupcakes.

You: Breakfast of Champions, man. And then, soon as I shake off the hangover and the diabetes, it’s onto making this novel the bonafide motherfucking bestseller it is destined to be. That’s what I’m scribbling here — a list of agents and editors who —

Me: Whoa, whoa, whoa, Captain Howdy, let me stop you right there.

You: Wha? Wha’d I say?

Me: I — I just — whhh — vuhhh — muhhhh. MUHGRBLE NNNNGH no! No. No. Is your plan really to finish this book and then just start flinging your story-shaped poo-ball into the inbox of every agent and editor you have chosen to punish? As if they’re dung beetles awaiting your crap?

You: Well. Yeah?

Me: Oh, goddamnit.

You: Hey, now. That’s the whole point of this NaNoWriMo adventure, isn’t it? To write a book, then to get that book published. I mean, holy shit, I’m sure whatever I wrote is better than what Snooki wrote. I figure whatever she turned in was just a ream of papers coated in smeary bronze tanner Snooki-prints. Grumpy Cat gets a book deal. Guy Fieri is still allowed to put words inside of things and sell them to us. You know what I heard? The giant wrecking ball from the Miley Cyrus video has a book deal. I’m not kidding. It’s called, LIFE WITH CHLAMYDIA.

Me: That’s mean. You’re saying Miley Cyrus has chlamydia.

You: No, the wrecking ball caught it from unprotected sex with other wrecking balls. God, you’re very insensitive, you know that? Check your privilege, son. No, Miley Cyrus does not have chlamydia. She has, however, had her tongue replaced with an angry eel. Which is very sad that kids these days feel they need to have these procedures to feel cool and to fit in at —

Me: Just shut up. Shut your sugar hole. No more talky. We need to get back to this poison pill of a plan you’re trying to get me to swallow. Sending off your NaNoWriMo manuscript on December 1st is — to quote Chris Traeger, literally the worst idea you have ever had. Ever. Ever! Ever.

You: Even worse than the time I —

Me: This is not Family Guy. Stop that.

You: Ugh, blech, blergh, whatever. I wrote this fancy book and now I’m not supposed to do anything with it? Just sit on it like it’s a chair? You’re not my Dad. (Wait, or are you?) Whatever. Point is: I did the hard part. Now I need to reap sweet reward.

Me: The hard part. The hard part? The hard part?! Hey, hold on, I’m gonna laugh for 17 minutes.

*18 minutes passes*

Me: There we go. *wipes eyes, blows nose*

You: That was eighteen minutes.

Me: Well, turns out what you said was extra stupid. The hard part is not writing a book. That is actually the easiest part. Writing a book is the Play-Doh phase. It’s just you smooshing words together and screaming out ideas and making your action figure characters do shit and say shit. It’s a drunken clumsy race to the finish line. It’s inelegant. It’s the braying of a donkey. What comes next is not fill up this super-soaker with my word-vomit and hose down the publishing industry with it. What comes next is edit this thing into something resembling a great novel.

You: No, nope, mm-mm, I know what’s happening here. You’re just trying to keep me from competing with you. I know that agents and editors have a job and that job is to take my word-barf and delicately shape it into the flower it’s yearning to become.

Me: December 1st, do you know what agents and editors do?

You: Uh, celebrate all the sweet reads they’re about to get?

Me: They have an underground bunker in Greenbriar, West Virginia. They leave Manhattan in these shadowy buses and drive there. They don’t get to spend Christmas with family or friends, because they go to the bunker for the whole month. The bunker has concrete walls thick enough to withstand a howitzer shelling. They have a supply of food and water. They bring lots of books. Good books. Real books. But the most important thing they don’t bring is a goddamn internet connection because as soon as they jump onto the Information Superhighway they’re gonna get pulped into bloody asphalt treacle by the 18-wheeler mega-truck carrying a flat-bed stacked high with a million shitty NaNoWriMo manuscripts. It’s crazytown up in there. I hear last year they ran out of coffee and Hot Pockets and had to eat a few junior editors and agent interns.

You: So, this bunker — it has a mailing address? I can put together a SASE, which is technically a thing I don’t know, uh, what it is, but I assume it’s an artifact from the forgotten “VCR Epoch” of man that I still see on submission guidelines sometimes, so I’ll just whip one of those together and send it off as soon as you give me the —

Me: I’m not giving you the address. What I will give you is a kick to the face. I will kick you so hard, your face will mold around my foot and become a comfortable flesh-slipper. As I will not have a second slipper, I will then proceed to do the same to some other part of your body. Kidneys. Solar plexus. Ass. Genitals. Whatever. I will wear you as slippers, is what I’m saying, because increasingly, that’s all you’re good for.

You: You know what? The publishing industry doesn’t want my genius, fuck ’em. Gatekeepers! That’s what they’re called, right? They’re like flying babies with flaming swords keeping the riff-raff out of Eden — oh, ho, ho, but we have built our own Eden called self-publishing. Boom. Done. Just click publish! *rips shirt off, starts to tattoo that phrase on chest*

Me: Sure, because that’s what the audience needs. Just piles and piles of garbage floating around their book-shopping experience. You know why I go to a store? To buy products curated by that store. I go to Target because I want to buy a loaf of bread from approved bread-providers, not because I want to look through a thousand different breads from a thousand different amateur hour bread-makers that range from, “Okay, this could be good” to “Oh, someone poured a half-pound of all-purpose-flour in a dirty gym sock and hit it with a flamethrower.” You don’t see a shitpile and go and shit on it in order to make it bigger, do you?

You: What if I do?

Me: Weirdo.

You: Well, somebody doesn’t like self-publishing.

Me: Hey, shut up. I love self-publishing. It’s a fantastic option. It’s changed everything. I just happen to like author-publishers who treat this thing as if they’re goddamn professionals. I like self-publishers who want to compete with traditional publishing instead of competing with rats in an alleyway fighting over a spent condom. And being professional means taking it through all the steps to make your book the best book it can become.

You: Ugh, god, fine. I won’t send it off to agents and editors. I won’t just stick it up on Amazon with this really cool MS Paint cover I did of a velociraptor making love to a helicopter. (Spoiler: it’s called RAPTORCOPTER.) I will wait. And I guess you’re going to tell me I need to blah blah blah edit my book so flippity floppity floo it doesn’t suck or something.

Me: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to tell you. Repeat after me: writing is when we make the words, editing is when we make the words not shitty.

You: CHUCK WENDIG IS A GIANT POOP SOCK

Me: *kicks face, wears it like a slipper*

You: *whimper*

Me: Tomorrow, we talk about editing. Good day. I SAID GOOD DAY.

I’ve come around to digging what NaNoWriMo does for the penmonkey breed, particularly having seen so many writers who have officially or unofficially ended up with published work based on their efforts during this most scribbly of months.

That being said, and this is something I talked about a bit on Twitter today: National Novel Writing Month takes the art of storytelling and the craft of writing and ladles across it a heavy shellacking of gamification. Which can work, to be clear — folks have found a great deal of value in applying a kind of social game code with attendant rules and conditions to everything from running to cooking to beer drinking.

When it works, it works.

The problem is, writing is a very peculiar, personal, persnickety endeavor — we all have our ways to do it and we further sometimes bind our hearts and minds up so deeply in the briar-tangle of wordsmithy that it becomes difficult to unsnarl our emotions from the whole thing. Which doesn’t lend itself well to to the game language that pervades the whole thing.

And thus enters one of my sole remaining concerns with NaNoWriMo, which is reliance on language like “winning” and “losing” as regards the month long novel-writing adventure. This isn’t a game of Monopoly, after all. It’s not a race in which one competes.

It’s writing a book.

As we round the bend, I’m starting to see people talk about how they’re going to “lose” — and that’s absurdist horseshit. Keep writing. NaNoWriMo is what got you started doing this thing, but it doesn’t have to be — and maybe shouldn’t be — why you finish it.

And so, it’s worth remembering:

If you finish your book on December 1st, or January 3rd or May 15th, you still won. Because HOLY SHIT YOU FINISHED A NOVEL. So few manage this epic feat that it’s worth a freeze-frame fist-bump no matter when you manage to actually stick the landing. The goal is to write a book whether it takes you one month or one year — failing to complete 50,000 words in a month that contains Thanksgiving and the ramp up to Christmas should never be regarded as a loser move.

Don’t worry about winning or losing. If it’s hurting your mindset, reject the gamification aspect. Hell, I could write my name 25,000 times and “win” the event. Or I could write 45,987 words of amazing prose that will one day be part of a bestselling novel and I’d still “lose.”

So, hang tight.

The calendar is not your prison.

NaNoWriMo is good when it helps you.

And when it hurts you, it should be curb-stomped and left for dead.

Your words matter. Whether you wrote 10,000 or 50,000 or 115,000.

Keep writing.

Finish your shit.

Completo el Poopo.

Last week of NaNoWriMo, writerly humans.

And so, I’m here to ask:

How’s it going? How’d the whole month go? Was this your first time? Will this be your last? Comments, questions, complaints? Anything me or any other writers can offer by way of dubious and uncertain guidance? It’s a tough row for folks who haven’t done it before and who don’t necessarily write at this pace all year around, and November can be a pretty wonky month in terms of time — so, honest appraisals and serious questions, fling ’em into the comment section.