It’s the last few days of this year’s NaNoWriMo. Have you finished your 50,000-word draft? Don’t worry if not. Making your words count is more important than your word count, says Linda Gillard.
Do you have writer’s cramp yet? Or typist’s tremor? Have you entered the annual November writing marathon that is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)? If you did, did you finish, or did you give up exhausted halfway through the month?
I’m a professional writer with six published novels on my CV, so I’m not your typical WriMo-er but, encouraged by the buzz and some enthusiastic writing friends, I attempted NaNoWriMo for the first (and almost certainly last) time in 2010.
It was an illuminating experience and taught me a lot about how I write. I gave up halfway through the month with a word count of 26,000. I didn’t abandon my novel, I simply stopped beating myself up about speed and resumed my normal writing pace and methods. I’d discovered that NaNoWriMo was not for me. I eventually finished that novel and, like most of my books, it took me a bit more than a year to write.
I made a good start even though I’d not done lot of planning. (I don’t plan my novels very much anyway, so this wasn’t raising the bar for me.) Producing quantities of words isn’t difficult for me, but writing at NaNo speed confirmed for me what I’ve always thought about novel-writing: finding time to write a novel isn’t nearly as difficult as finding time to think a novel.
And that’s what was missing from my NaNo experience. Time to think. I wasn’t day-dreaming, hypothesizing, re-thinking or revising – all those processes that, for me, are what novel-writing is about. I was just producing an impressive daily word count.
My fictional set-up was promising. The writing was competent. Then at 18,000 words things started to get tough. Artistic decisions had to be made and I wanted to slow down and reflect on what I’d produced so far. I knew I needed to get to know my characters better. In short, I wanted my novel-in-progress to develop and mature. But that’s not what NaNoWriMo is about. It’s about “getting all your ideas down” – that and the big confidence boost of actually finishing a draft.
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I have the results of a NaNoWriMo sitting published next to me on my desk right now. I’m very excited. I found that the pace and endurance gave me the confidence to continue writing. Once I hit 30 I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to writing that novel, so NaNoWriMo gave me the chance to.
Mind you my life was a slower pace at that time. I had more downtime to think about the novel and its progression. Thanks for the article.
NaNoWriMo works brilliantly for some people and I’m glad it really paid off for you, Gord. I couldn’t make it work for me, but then my problem wasn’t showing up at my desk & putting in the hours. My problem was/is carving out the thinking time and NaNo didn’t help me with that.
Thanks for commenting on my article.
Thank you for the article. I was feeling failurific as the month came to an end. WriMo doesn’t allow me the time to do other things like draw or write songs. These are the things I think spur me on toward inspiration when the writing dries up. During WriMo I feel guilty when I do those things, like I’m shirking a responsibility, so I stop. Then absolutely nothing comes out. I need those distractions to keep me going. I’m glad WriMo works for some, it’s just not conducive to my process.
I did Nano last year, Linda, and managed the 50K words, but it took me another 7 or 8 months to get it to the standard I wanted, and I eventually submitted it on Nov 1st this year. Like you, I missed the thinking process, and the last half of what I wrote during Nano was probably the worst writing I’ve ever done! I felt like I was sacrificing quality for quantity, and didn’t really enjoy that. It’s the main reason I didn’t sign up for Nano again this year.
Works for some, but not for me. I need the thinking and planning time and I know that whatever I produced would be no more than a very basic outline of where I wanted to go – I do admire people who can gaily knock out a few thousand words a day, but it’s just not me.
Nanowrimo is, in my humble opinion, there to show each of us that we have a novel inside us, and that it can come out, sooner than we may think. It’s not intended for those who already know these things.
For those who have already written a novel and have had no trouble starting on a second, Nano may be month’s worth of pointless exercise.
But for the vast multitudes of writers and maybe-writers who procrastinate and low-self-esteem their way out of ever accomplishing their first novel, Nanowrimo is a way to overcome both barriers at once. That’s a brilliant thing.
As for whether the writing will be good — well, no. No matter what, if you’ve never put together 50,000 words before, you’re unlikely to write something of quality. You haven’t paid your dues and written your first million words of crap.
But to get the first 50K of those crap words onto paper in just a month, watching your own progress and that of others, learning from their mistakes as well as your own, and realizing that it’s not the insurmountable task you had built it into, wow, that’s a good combination of things for a newbie novelist.
I heartily recommend Nano for anyone who hasn’t written a novel yet, and maybe even for those who have but haven’t yet published one. It’s a great way to get those first efforts out of the way quickly while clearing out the clogged writing pipes.
I was trying to use Nanowrimo this year to finish my second novel. I failed miserably. In 2007, however, I wrote my first novel and completed Nanowrimo. I made sure that when things got sticky I would stop and meditate and try to get into my characters’ heads. I found that after bouts of meditation the words came flying out.
I think Nanowrimo can work if you have most of the novel planned out in your head. Sometimes things come flying out that you never expected.
I also firmly believe that Nanowrimo is only the first baby-step for a novel. So much editing must be done to the stream of consciousness writing that results that you can’t really count it as having being written in a month. The months afterwards are for exploring the sentences that you got out and refining them, correcting grammar, and fixing story holes.
Nanowrimo 2007 helped me to get past that mental hurdle of getting my first novel out and Nanowrimo 2012 helped me to get going again on my second novel. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish it again, but I do know that it helps to give me a kick in the pants.
I have this very silly image in my head – of people standing round looking at NaNo as if it were a slightly smelly dog. They want to be kind and compassionate towards the poor creature but really don’t want to reach out a hand and actually touch the thing.
I’m throwing in my tuppenceworth because I love naNo – well I would, wouldn’t I – given that I’ve just finished (successfully) my second in a row. I am a journalist – and I am a writer – albeit of Mills and Boon books which may not allow me to qualify for the title in some quarters.
That may explain why I love NaNo and why I get so much out of it. I know deadlines and I value them. They concentrate my mind and – so far at any rate – they have completely refused to let me even countenance the idea of ‘writer’s block’.
I have found NaNo to be an incredibly liberating experience – setting me free to say at some stage every day ‘I have to go and write now’ – and also giving me free rein to write gibberish. The gibberish isn’t set in stone – it’s just there as a marker, giving me some notion of what I wanted to say at the time. I can say it properly later.
This year – Nano saw two of my nephews take up their pens. Both have said for years that they wanted to write. Now they’ve actually done it. One has crossed the 50k line, the other keeled over at 40k – matters not a jot. Still a fantastic achievement – and I reckon both will now see writing in a very different way. Will they continue with their stories? Maybe yes and maybe no. In a strange way, that really isn’t the point.
Finally – and my sincere apologies for wittering on – I see NaNo as a kind of London or New York marathon. Thousands will take part – only a handful will finish in a respectable time, if at all. Some who failed will be tarnished forever by the experience – but many others will still be reliving it in their dotage. Because that’s what it is – an experience. And yes – all being well I will do it all over again in 2013. Because – quite apart from anything else – it’s damn good fun.
I agree with you, Gilly – all the time it’s fun, it can’t do any harm and it might be an exhilarating & productive experience. But feeling a failure isn’t fun and RSI isn’t fun. It was those issues among others I was addressing. When the fun stops for writers – writers at whatever level of experience – I think it’s time to take stock.
As someone who’s well accustomed to failure – and indeed a touch of RSI, I do see what you’re saying. BUT – we can’t all succeed at everything we do and I truly believe it’s wrong to let people think otherwise. How are you going to embrace and rejoice in success – as I have quite blatantly and shamelessly with NaNo – if you haven’t been slapped round the face by failure as well? And – I would swiftly add – NaNo doesn’t slap those who don’t ‘win’ in any way – they just keep on encouraging them.