NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, is the annual challenge to spend November writing a novel. But it tends to leave most of its participants realising that what they’ve written is, well, part of a novel, even if they’ve reached the target of 50,000 words written in one month. Even those who complete their novels still need to edit them. Now, NaNoFinMo has been created to encourage writers to get those part-novels finished, edited and ready for publication; it stands, of course for National Novel Finishing Month.

The NaNo website only allows targets to be set in words, not in chapters, pages, or other values, so I chose an arbitrary target of 1000 words a day. Pretty achievable, you might think, considering that the original challenge was to write 2000 words a day.

By Day 8, I had realised my mistake.

Editing is not like writing the first draft. Yes, I had extra words to write to complete the book, but their quantity wasn’t important: they had to be the best words, not the most words. I needed to feel free to delete words, sentences and paragraphs – maybe even entire chapters if necessary – without worrying about reaching a pre-assigned word count. An effective day’s editing could easily result in a negative word count figure, but that’s fine, if the finished book is the better for having cleared out the trash.

During NaNoWriMo, I had found that posting daily updates on the Island Writers Facebook page helped to encourage me to put in a full day’s effort, and I enjoyed choosing appropriate pictures from Pixabay to illustrate my mood or level of achievement. So I didn’t want to give up the idea of posting my targets during NaNoFinMo (which, to match the shark’s ‘Fin’ in the title, were all water-themed).

So, taking an average of my actual word counts from the first week, I cut my official target to 500 words a day, to try to keep myself on track. However, my unwritten target was to edit one chapter every two days, thus completing my 15-chapter novel in 30 days.

Did it work? Sad to say, no.

The first thing I did wrong was not planning and preparing properly. I made a last-minute decision, and I still had some important paperwork which took up my time, but needed to be sorted out urgently.

And then, a warm, sunny April was the wrong time of year to force myself to stay shut away indoors. In the early part of the month, I was too willing to let other distractions and responsibilities take preference. After all, I had plenty of time. There were so many jobs I needed to get done in the garden, and because of the fine weather, I made the decision to prioritise them.And then, on the 12th, the lockdown restrictions were partly relaxed, so we had several medical appointments and other social commitments.

More importantly, my revised target was still a numerical daily word target – still not the right kind of target. Nor was the unofficial chapter-every-two-days target helpful, as some of the chapters were almost complete, some needed rewriting, some were hardly started and one I decided to scrap entirely, while some of the editing involved rearranging the order of what I’d written, and breaking some parts up into different chapters.

Unfortunately, by simply not worrying about whether I managed to reach the word total, I had unwittingly removed my main motivator for finishing my book: my daily ‘reward’ to myself of choosing a photo from Pixabay to present each day’s update. Far from helping it all to go swimmingly, as I’d hoped, I was floating off in the wrong direction, and rewarding myself whether I’d worked hard at my editing or not.

What I should have done, I realise now, is set a target for the amount of time spent editing. And when I say, ‘editing,’ I don’t mean checking my emails, looking at cat pictures on Facebook, reading articles in Writing Magazine, making a sandwich, putting a wash in the machine, buying stuff on Ebay, mowing the lawn, typing up the agenda from a meeting, mending my chair because it’s a bit wobbly, watering my plants, answering questions on Quora, or emptying the recycling bin. Because, apparently, none of those improved my book at all. Who knew, right?

But I’m not downhearted.

During this month, I wrote over 9000 extra words for my novel, which is a lot more than I’d normally have achieved. I’ve also managed to tweak it and pummel it into a much more effective shape – it’s getting there!

Many thanks to Katie and the other members of the Island Writers Facebook group who have left supportive comments and ‘likes’ to encourage me on my NaNoFinMo journey.

Of course, I’ve given my opinion on other people’s writing before. Expressing my thoughts on others’ work is easy and enjoyable. What’s harder is to critique in a helpful and inspiring way, rather than leaving a trail of sobbing victims, all vowing they’ll never write again!

Often, when writers ask for other people’s opinions on their first draft, they don’t really want to hear what you think. They’re expecting to be told that it’s all wonderful. But a first draft is rarely the last draft – or it shouldn’t be.

It’s easy to get unconditional praise when you’ve written an entire book – most people are incredibly impressed and assume it must be a piece of utter brilliance, simply because it’s finished. Wow! Look at all those thousands of words! Well done!

It’s also easy to get the sort of feedback that consists of pointing out every typo, and actually that’s not terribly helpful during the first stage of the revision process. There will be a time to fix spelling mistakes, misused words, double-size gaps and grammatical errors later.

Initially, the writer needs to be sure they’re happy with the overall structure of the book and the quality of their writing – the way the plot develops, the balance of the relationships between the characters, and the believability of situations and dialogue. That’s where a critique can help.

What if someone asks for a critique of their book, and I think it’s utter rubbish? Fortunately, I haven’t had that problem on this occasion. Perhaps it can’t exist: some books may not be quite ready to publish yet, or possibly need major changes, but I don’t feel any lack of respect for them or their writers. It’s down to the writer to decide whether it would be easier to start again from scratch, or to rewrite – I can’t see myself telling anyone it would be kinder to take their novel out and shoot it to put it out of its misery.

We all need to develop thick skins and accept that we can’t please everyone with our writing, otherwise our first few negative reviews on Amazon would be devastating. As I said at our first Island Writers meeting, a writer needs the humility to listen to advice, and then the confidence to choose not to follow it. I’ve tried to make it clear to the writers I’m critiquing that they will need to select what works for them out of the advice I’ve given, and reject the rest.

The critique process has been interesting and thought-provoking, Sometimes, it’s only seeing how other people are doing things wrong that teaches you how to do your own writing better. I hoped I could help other writers by giving them critical feedback, but in fact, I’ve probably learned more from the experience than my ‘victims’ have!