Congratulating myself on winning Camp NaNoWriMo & Re-writing my 22,000 word play

I’ve changed my mind again — with some success

You may have read a lot of differing opinions about how to ‘win’ NaNoWriMo, whether it be the November, February or July variety.

Having failed miserably in November 2022, and having forgotten about the thing by February 2023, I came to Camp NaNo in July 2023 hoping to be more successful. And I was.

So how did you achieve your goal, you may ask? It was simple really —

I cheated.

I’d already written 22,000 words of the miserable thing; so it was quite easy to say I had ‘won’ by doing ‘finishing touches’ in the first two weeks of July…..

Well, never mind. CampNaNo goals are flexible. It wasn’t ‘cheating’ as such, I’d just set a very low bar. Creativity is hard to put into a timeline. It’s actually almost impossible to say when a project begins.

The play I have written is called Percival and the Holy Grail. But did it begin with that secondary character called ‘Parsifal’ in a forgotten script from four years ago which I recently re-discovered? Or did it start when I read The Waste Land, or when I watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Did it start when I participated in the National Theatre’s writing course, where I developed the skills to write such a large project?

I wrote a draft of the play last year, and an early version of this was highly commended by the National Theatre. This motivated me to develop it further to 22,000 words — the longest project I’d ever written. A complete play. But, unsatisfied with it, and after a few rejections from competitions, I decided to re-write it as a novel in November. This did not materialise, as I have written about previously, so it went on hold and other projects took over.

Then came a sudden redundancy and a lot of time on my hands, between job searching and interviews — But along with that came an agitated state of mind that was, obviously, unable to relax. I had to do something, and something that would preferably be a profitable use of my time.

I remembered the 22,000 words I had in a folder on my laptop, collecting metaphorical dust.

So I decided to adapt it into something better.

Ended up re-writing the thing altogether…

27,000 words later (!) three scenes out of 18 remained of the original draft. The main characters are the same, but the dynamics between them changed. And there was a new villain.

Ultimately, it was NaNoWriMo in November that got me started looking at those 22,000 words again, and Camp NaNo that gave me that motivation to finish. So to an extent I recall what I said before and maintain my initial thoughts — NaNo does have value.

But as mentioned, creativity cannot be boxed in. Looking over the original draft and Percival and the Holy Grail, the differences are so huge that I’m not even sure whether to call Percival and the Holy Grail a ‘final draft’ at all, but rather a new work. But there’s also too much overlap to say it is entirely new…

It doesn’t matter. The more I read and write, the more I realise how much of the process is unconscious. Never mind your planning and outlines and story structures… All of that just makes stories that are too neat, too logical. And personally, I do like neat and logical things. I’m not into too much of the Absurd or into discordant modern music.

But the original ending of this new draft was too neat — it ended with the main characters of legend (Percival, his sister and Galahad) presenting the Holy Grail to the Fisher King and he is restored to health. Too neat, and too close to my source material (Le Morte d’Arthur). I re-wrote it with an ending that was… more like the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which strangely made more sense. It was only then that I realised what I was actually writing about.

I’d become constrained by source material and details — and the associated peril of symbolism. As I said, my original draft was too similar. When writing the 22,000 word version, I had Le Morte d’Arthur open in front of me, as well as The Waste Land, and Withnail & I. This didn’t help; it just led to overthinking and a lack of originality and a chaotic hodge-podge.

It also didn’t help that I was thinking about the audience, more specifically the admins/producers/writers who may be reading it; thinking too much about the pathetic conventions of theatre today.

You don’t need to ‘follow’ other writers styles and methods, however highly you regard them, and however helpful their works may be. Ultimately, what you are writing is a synthesis of all of your personal impressions, even things you can’t remember. As I said, I’ve writing about a character called ‘Parsifal’ for years, and I wasn’t really aware! (Parsifal after Wagner’s opera which, again, must have made a greater impression on me that I realised.)

When using sources, write a critical response to them, which will be fresh and uniquely your own — I’ve written about this more clearly here. And the worst thing you can do is to put the audience before your own artistic instincts.

Overall, the artist’s process and work, I believe, should grow organically. That doesn’t mean to say that there is no value in outlining — there certainly is. I always outline my stories. But the story I end up with is usually very different. And it seems that the larger the project, the more room for divergence from this plan.

This is why artists often come back to their work and make corrections (Rachmaninoff’s symphonies, Stravinsky’s ballets etc.) They didn’t have some master plan for how the thing was going to end up. It’s a step-by-step process and sometimes a character does or says something you didn’t expect and the story takes a different turn. Often it seems that I’m discovering the story rather than writing it; watching the scenes unfold rather than directing them.

This is the joy of writing, of all art. Don’t let time-constraints, over-planning or over-thinking diminish that.

Sound&Vision.