Stephanie here. I’m SO excited to be hosting Colin Cannici today! Colin has been a part of our community for a while now, and I loved reading his insights from writing a novel so quickly. I kept finding myself nodding as I read through it. Even if you’re indifferent about the idea of writing a novel in such a short time span, I think you’ll still find lots of wisdom in his words!

Colin Cannici is a novelist and aspiring mathematician. He writes high and heroic fantasy and dabbles in poetry, and loves learning, honing, and analyzing the author’s craft in all its forms. In his free time, he studies and practices martial arts, works as a university math tutor, and occasionally takes up new skills like knitting and piano. His dream of becoming a published author began in first grade, and has grown exponentially since finishing his first novel draft in 2011. He lives in Colorado with his siblings and benevolently author-tolerant parents.

Toward the end of 2021, I found myself in a writing funk. I’d spent most of the year slogging through the second draft of a dear novel, but it simply wasn’t coming together. Worse, I wasn’t having fun anymore. You might be familiar with the feeling: you want to write something good (or anything at all), you just can’t seem to muster the interest or excitement. I decided something entirely new (and drastic) was needed to reinvigorate my writing.

Enter NaNoWriMo. Feeling daring, I chose a promising idea called The Enchantress and went at it from scratch. NaNo is crazy enough in its basic form—50,000 words in one month!—but at some point in the fervor of November I got really excited about my new book and had the crazier idea to actually finish it in December.

One book. Two months. I’d never done anything like it. But it worked—I wrote the entire thing (roughly 95,000 words) in exactly sixty days! It turned out to be one of the best writing experiences of my life. I learned so much about my own writing and the craft in general that, once I’d recovered from the madness, I decided to record some of my epiphanies and try to share them. And what better place than Go Teen Writers?

So, here are six things I learned from writing a full-length novel in two months:

Commitment increases productivity.

I’ll be honest: much of why I struggled in the second draft I mentioned was due to a lack of real commitment. Part of the beauty of NaNo is that it demands commitment. You either determine to write and actually write, or you don’t make the quota.

The reality of writing (and every other skill or job) is that nothing gets finished without commitment. Ambivalence only gets you so far. If you’re struggling to make progress, you’ve got to promise yourself: “This is my project and I’m going to stick with it—even when it gets hard.” And then you actually stick with it.

Writing is hard. The Enchantress was no exception. But when I invested myself in consistently working on it rather than settling for “It’ll get done when it gets done,” it got done and I was pleased with the result. Don’t get me wrong, there are times when stepping back is the best decision—I haven’t touched that second draft since October, and the story and I are both better for it—but there are also (frequent) times when, to get words on the page, you must sit down and commit to putting them there. Remember, ambivalence is easy. It doesn’t require any stretch. But commitment allows us to push ourselves. It allows us to improve.

The best scenes matter to the story.

You’ve probably heard that “every scene should contribute to the plot/character arcs in some way.” This is very true. Because I wrote The Enchantress so fast, I didn’t have much time to think. I wrote the main story, because that was what I knew. And to get the main story done, every scene had to develop it in some way. Every scene had to carry meaning.

What makes a scene meaningful? It might create or resolve conflicts, cause a character to change, or force the plot to turn—or all of them at once. The commonality is relevance; does it develop what already exists? Does it grow organically from the previous one?

Here’s a good litmus test: Any time your characters care about how a scene turns out, it’s meaningful. How do you make them care? Add stakes that matter to them personally. In my case, a random bandit attack becomes a moment of serious questioning for the main character when his purported friend, the titular (evil) enchantress who claims to want to reform, almost kills the bandit leader just for touching her. What might’ve been an unnecessary event now begins the slow unraveling of the MC’s stalwart belief in his enchantress. What if she had killed that man? Does she really want to reform? Has he made a huge mistake in supporting her at all?

If your characters are lukewarm on how a scene turns out, it’s probably unnecessary. But play around with this. Maybe a scene that doesn’t mean much in one place means a whole lot more at a different stage of the book.

Pacing depends on the plot.

This fits neatly with the previous point. Content that has little to do with the plot/characters often becomes non-meaningful filler. And the original phrasing of this point in my notebook puts it bluntly: filler is bad.

While writing The Enchantress, I learned that the best thing I can do for a book’s pacing is move on to the next meaningful narrative point. You might predict that this would cause rapid-fire overload (which, by the way, I think it could without proper care), but overwhelmingly I found that it creates fewer stilted transitions and encourages natural progression. After all, why break up the actual story with an interlude that doesn’t pertain to it?

Prior to these mad two months, I wrote what I felt made sense for pacing, whether or not it served the plot—along the lines of “there should be a chapter between this beat and that one because there’s geographic space between them.” And sometimes that’s true. But pacing is not a matter of words, pages, or chapters; it depends on the progression of the plot. Again, if a realization/turning point/processing scene makes sense based on past developments, the pacing is most likely correct. (This isn’t to say that you can’t miss some things on a relatively snappy first go-around—that’s why they call ’em first drafts, after all.)

Dialogue should affirm characters’ participation in the story.

It took me writing almost 100K words in two months to realize why “scripted” dialogue sounds scripted. It sounds as though characters are aware of their arcs, or other characters’ arcs, or the next beat in the story, or the plot as a whole. And everyone knows that an actor who acts like they’re in a play isn’t convincing. To feel natural, the characters must act and speak as though they are experiencing the story in real time, for the first time.

This means that the characters don’t sit down and have a long discussion about every possible eventuality, or about how they think everything will wrap up—unless it actually makes sense. I, the author, may be aware of the full plot, or at least what comes next, but they aren’t. If they react to or participate in or process parts of the story as if it were a story, it breaks the illusion of fiction.

So don’t be afraid to have characters fumble for the right thing to say, or not find it at all. Don’t be afraid to have them give indirect answers or steer the conversation away from “the plot” to discuss things that matter to them (i.e. the actual plot). I found this improved my dialogue immensely, just by virtue of characters talking through things as if the stakes were real. (And this point can be generalized: deep characters participate in their story instead of just acting it out.)

Intentional breaks increase creativity.

In addition to writing, writers tend to think about writing. If you’re like me, you do it almost all the time. Especially when there’s a problem in your manuscript that you desperately want to fix.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking about writing when you’re not actively producing words, but it can easily become obsessive. In my case, I used to think that constantly crunching story problems in my brain was an efficient use of my time. In fact, that’s not always true.

Constantly thinking about your story—particularly when there’s some difficulty to overcome—leads to burnout and frustration. This is another reason why my previous second draft stagnated. I felt like I should constantly calculate and recalculate story problems so that I’d be prepared the next time I sat down to write. It sounds great, but it amounts to working all the time, which is a proven recipe for anti-productivity.

Mercifully, the pace at which I wrote The Enchantress didn’t give me a choice on this. I had to produce so many words per day (compared to my previous output, at least) that by the time each writing session was done, I didn’t want to think about the story anymore. Sometimes I did anyway, but as I progressed I realized that actively not thinking about the book—even for just a few hours—was the rest I needed to make gains. It even improved my thought process when I did decide to think about the story away from the keyboard. Intentional breaks give you time to do other things (like fuel your creativity with books, movies, and other media) and encourage subconscious connections about your WIP.

It’s possible to silence the inner editor.

I never really believed this until I was presented with two mutually exclusive options: finish The Enchantress in the time I set, or obsessively rewrite/edit parts of it that weren’t “good enough.”

To be fair, my inner editor tends to be far more of a problem in second drafts than in first. I’m often engaged enough with creating a new story that it doesn’t occur to me to try and “fix” it along the way. That was mostly how The Enchantress went, until the second week of December.

I reached a major scene just before the climax. I had an idea for it, but I didn’t know much about the actual content. That’s fine, I thought—it’ll come as I write. So I wrote part of it. Then I decided I didn’t like the direction it took, so I stopped.

I started over, wrote part again, and stopped again. And then I did it again. And again.

I finally determined that, whether it “worked” or not, I had to settle for the fifth version or else I wouldn’t finish in time. I wisely chose to try something entirely different from the previous attempts, learning in the process that if something doesn’t “feel right” that many times over, it’s probably not the best option. And although I wasn’t totally satisfied with what came out, I was satisfied enough to move on.

How did I beat the inner editor? I allowed myself to tolerate a scene that “could be better.” I reassured myself that one mediocre scene does not hamstring the whole enterprise, that it could be fixed later, and that nothing has to be perfect on the first go-around. That’s probably true of the second and third go-arounds, too. The final book likely won’t be perfect, and you know what? That’s okay. In a contest between finishing a draft and obsessing over its perfection, I will gladly take finishing every time.

I’m working on the second draft of The Enchantress now, and I’m learning a lot from that too—and most importantly, I’m having fun again! Hopefully these lessons were helpful to you. A huge thanks to Stephanie, Jill, and Shannon for allowing me to share what I learned!

Do any of these points resonate with you? How can you apply them to your current project?