FSN - Day 21 - Writing by the Numbers

[ladyseishou]

Day 21 - 10 days until the start of NNWM




Today we embrace left-brain thinking and spend a little time looking at numbers as we assemble the skeletal pieces of our story based on our FSN lists for the opening, the catalyst (First Plot Point or inciting event), the midpoint, the events after the “all is lost moment” (Second Plot Point) and the ending.

Of course, the assembly of these key events for your story should be one of your own choosing but for simplicity and example, I have selected a popular outline/plotting method called the Save the Cat “beat sheet” by Blake Synder which itself is based upon the classic three-act structure for narrative fiction: set-up, conflict and resolution.

Yep, that’s right, Nano Writer, when it comes down to it, all you need to tell your story is a set-up, description of the inevitable conflict that comes out of your set-up, and how it all comes out in the end.

So, you ask, if that’s all you need, what’s with all the numbers? Wasn’t Friday suppose to fun? Well, for me numbers are fun… let me show you how…

Short answer: IMHO, numbers, or the idea of numbers, defines and creates our sense of reality from chaos. Umm, maybe that was a little too short and way too philosophical. Okay try this on for size:

To win NaNoWriMo,
write a 50,000 word “novel”
beginning on November 1,
validating your “final” word count
on or before November 30.

Too stark and unromantic? Well maybe. But the whole founding philosophy behind NaNoWriMo was the idea that deadlines can motivate an almost-maybe-someday writer into becoming a real writer by redefining the daunting, dare I say chaotic, novel-writing process as an accessible and fun challenge:

• Write a “novel” with a minimal word count of 50,000 words. Now some say that this word count best describes a “novella” but let’s leave that discussion for another day. It's also widely assumed and sometimes misunderstood, that this “novel” is what professional writers and editors refer to as a first draft and not as some suppose, a final draft - we good on that?
  
  
• Write this novel during the month of November which gives us 30 days to complete the challenge.

Numbers, right? So the first thing we can do to make the NaNoWriMo challenge a little more approachable is to break the writing down into manageable daily targets. So 50,000 words written over a 30 day period becomes 1,667 words a day.

And to make this daily goal even a little easier, we’ve suggested Nano Writers think of this daily goal as three writing goals for the day: 556 words written early in the morning and again during the day (commute time, lunch time) and one more time at night (after dinner, before bed).

So well and good. And it works - for the most part. The first week of November is glorious and full of great expectations and good fellowship until… the second week of November rolls around and then things start to go… well not so good.

There are a lot of theories as to why: schedules conflicts, writer’s block, and often the story just stalls out and that’s why we’ve worked on our lists, right? So for our lists, let’s come up with our own numbers!

Note: we’ll be using 50,000 words as our final goal but all calculations can be adjusted accordingly.

A manuscript page consists approximately of 250 words which means that a 50,000 word novel has 200 pages.

Using the “Save the Cat” Beat Sheet Calculator, we get the the following “blueprint” for our story:

Page	Beat
1	Opening Image
9	Theme Stated
1 − 18	The Set Up
22	The Catalyst
22 − 45	Debate
45	Break into Act II
55	B Story
36 − 100	Fun and Games
100	Midpoint
100 − 136	Bad Guys Close In
136	All Is Lost
136 − 155	Dark Night of the Soul
155	Break into Act III
155 − 200	The Finale
200	Final Image

What this chart shows us is where and when our Plot Points work best within the body of our story. Or more specifically, the opening scenes of the story - where we write about our hero’s “ordinary” world - begin on page one and should run about twenty pages or 5,000 words. After that, the First Plot Point - the event that entices our hero away from his ordinary life - comes into play around page 22.

The midpoint? That comes up around page 100 or at the 25K word-count mark (not too surprising, right?).

Plot Point Two? Our hero begins to have serious doubts about it all around page 136. The ending? Starts around page 155.

And everything else leads into, sets up, explains or leads away from these pivotal scenes in our story. Or in other words, following this plan will help ensure that you will finish your 50K novel first draft by November 30.


So do all stories follow this scheme? No, of course not. But many do.

And I imagine now what some of you are asking: what of creativity and spontaneity? Doesn’t following this plan lead to the worse kind of formulaic pulp fiction?

Why should it? It’s your story, your hero, your protagonist’s desires and abilities and character faults. Your antagonist too. And when the bad guys close in - it is your particular battles that will be fought and won or lost.

Still not convinced? Tell me then, gentle Nano Writer, what the movies Inception and The King’s Speech have in common besides nominations for Best Motion Picture? You guessed it if you said that the beats for both stories fit the “Save the Cat” Beat Sheet.

So get with the beat and try the “Save the Cat” Beat Sheet on for size. Questions? Comments? Favorite movie? It’s all good - so keep writing!

Comments

[moonreviews]

I was looking at the image and comparing it with a long Dutch story I am writing. It is at 28 pages with 14146 words. Which is a lot more than the amount of words in the "Debate" line. But when I translate my Dutch stories into English, the amount of pages doesn't really matter much. Probably my page layout is a bit different than the one used for the calculations in the image? (I use OpenOffice which has smaller white margins than Microsoft Word, would that make a 3000-word difference?).
I did some calculating for that story to get to 50000 words, which would make 135 pages.

[ladyseishou]

Manuscript format is usually specifically called out by type of work and publisher but generally speaking, a manuscript page is commonly written in a monospaced font (one of the Courier fonts being most common) in 10 to 12 points (which yields approximately 10 characters to the inch), double-spaced, and allowing at least an inch of margin space around the text.

This format yields approximately 250 words per page (this is the accepted standard) but because of varying word lengths in the English language, this word count is said to range easily from 175 to 300 words per page.

I am not familiar with the Dutch language so I can not guess how these numbers might translate to actual words per page for you even given your translation of your manuscript from Dutch to English. For example: the longest Dutch word on record with Guinness Book of World Records in 1996 was Kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamheden (49 characters) which I am given to understand may be translated as "preparation activities for a children's carnival procession” (59 characters), yielding a rough difference of 1 to 7 words after translation.

This is probably an extreme example but I would assume then that you would have the opposite problem: a 50,000-word story written in Dutch would be much longer than 200 pages but your 50K manuscript only has 135 pages. In this case then I would use your actual page count for the Beat Sheet calculator (link in post) and compare your story structure page count to the actual numbers provided by the calculator (based on percentages). So in this case, your “debate” beat might fall anywhere from page 15 to page 31 which according to your comment does indeed fall on page 28.

Please also keep in mind that these numbers are only approximations and guidelines, what I like to think of as “rules of thumb” especially given that what we write during NNWM is a first draft. I like to plot my story guided by the Save the Cat beats for the rough draft and if I happen to hit the numbers that’s all well and fine but it’s not something that I worry about. Fine tuning pacing and length will come later.

Hope that this might have been helpful!

[moonreviews]

I didn't know about the manuscript layout, interesting!
Your number breakdown does help, even though for Dutch the numbers will be a bit different, it's useful as a guideline :)

I always thought the longest Dutch word was "hottentottententententoonstelling" meaning an exposition of Hottentot tents (33 characters). But your 49-character word is a more normal word :) A trend I'm noticing in writing by people at university (who read a lot of English articles), is that people start to put spaces inbetween words when writing in Dutch as well (because in English, there are so many spaces inbetween words)...

I compared some of my translated stories:

Story 1: Dutch 122, English 115
Story 2: Dutch 2412, English 2334
story 3: Dutch 3648, English 3580
Story 4: Dutch 4437, English 4382

English has less words all the time! I think that is caused by Dutch verbs which are split up when in 3rd-person form (and thus the word count goes up), as well as many small words without any real meaning which disappear in the English translations. You can also make long words by combining several words into one (which is when English uses more words for the same things), but apparently that's not used that much in above stories.