What is NaNoWriMo?National Novel Writing Month is a "fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing", as their founder puts it. A few years ago, it was hell.
Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight, November 30. And for almost a decade, Chris Baty has led an ever growing group of aspiring writers and novelists down the river into the heart of darkness.
On the surface, it is innocent and enthusiastic. To invigorate the writer, and motivate them to create without concern about perfection.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
While they are pushing the light-heartedness of the experience, any writer with more realistic aspirations (like Yours Famously) should find the task nearly impossible and troublesome from the outset. As stated in their rules, the writing dates are fixed, and what’s more you must come up with an idea from scratch on November 1st. Writing 50,000 words on a story you’ve already extensively outlined, developed and researched is verboten. And hard as hell.
I came up with my tale and got to work on it after a good day of thinking my ass off on a basic plot, which fortunately was easily expandable and allow me to research and develop as I hammered out the characters and setting in the early chapters. About midway through the month I started worrying about keeping up with my output in order to cross the word barrier. Even though I was starting to slip, I didn’t lose quality or focus on telling the story properly, and so I gave up that concern. Also, I realized that my story was going to be far beyond their word goal, which made me happy, but I wondered how folks were capable of meeting such a stringent guideline and not sacrifice the essence of their idea.
It turned out they couldn’t.
Some had posted excerpts of their work, and it was total shit. Yes, writers are critical of their “contemporaries” – a term I use only to say they too were writing, but the things I read were poorly expressed, boring, and utterly unreadable. Working regular hours left little time at night or on weekends to live pleasantly, let alone crank out a novel, and I saw that the level of talent of those who were making their quota was relative. With a level of creativity equal to their level of responsibility (which must approach zero), it made much more sense what I was seeing.
Somewhere past 30,000 words and with less than a week, I decided to pull the plug on the race that need not be run. It wasn’t sour grapes on not meeting the challenge, but sour feelings about the careless forces driving the process. In third grade, the teacher gave you creative writing exercises with the same risk-free goal of completion. Being unbound by editorial restraint and conventional judgment is fine when you’re eight, but the real creative process isn’t crapping out volumes of words, it’s condensing it to only the necessary ones. I was glad to be preliminarily inspired and try the project, where the only reward is to have verification you met the word count, but the context of the writing lost it’s charm when I saw what was at stake in order to complete the game – writing well.
This near-daily waste of time is but exercise for thinking quickly and developing ideas with a creative twist, but like NaNoWriMo, it is foreplay to real writing and should never be considered as such. And the more I bloggulate, the more I see the difference between that and longform storycraft, and like writing what likely does not constitute a decent story in under a month, the more you strive for one yet do the other, the further the two roads split.
And so Scartoe, I warn you against undertaking the process.
1 comment:
I can't never really right anyways. So why waste my times. Its ok. I got pleny of other things to do. Thanks for the advise. Your a true freind and wisdom.
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