Why You Should Do NaNoWriMo... Once.

Tuesday October 14, 2014

If you aspire to write or you have a friend that writes, then I would wager money that you have have heard of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Facebook and Twitter have been buzzing for a couple of months now about the event’s approach. Every November writers of all stripes are supposed to embark on a one month quest: write a 50,000 word novel. That’s 1,666 words a day for those who want to know just how involved the task is. As a program to get people excited about writing and being a writer? Wonderful! I did NaNoWriMo in 2012, and I did not win (write 50,000 words.) I fell short, at around 33-35,000 words. I had a stupendously fun time as most group activities that involve suffering are hilarious and fun. Many of my friends were also writing for the event, so there was plenty to commiserate about and plenty of shoulders to cry on. While it was a blast, I will not participate again. NaNo showed me a lot about myself as a writer, including how I write and what I need to write. First, let’s start with the good:

-I CAN write that many words.

-I ENJOY writing enough to be a writer.

-I CAN commit to a project.

I wrote over 30,000 words in a month. I did not win, but I felt accomplished. I felt like I had made progress on a project that had stalled for over a year (my novel.) I enjoyed sitting there and writing for multiple hours a day. Finally, I saw that The Good Humans was a project that I really wanted to commit to - that my obsessive day dreaming for the past two years had been fruitful.

The Bad:

-My writing was crap.

-The writing technique of successful NaNoWriMoers is terrible.

-I had to start over.

-50,000 words is actually 1/2 of a standard length novel.

When I say my writing was crap, I cannot use strong enough terms: my writing really, actually, totally sucked. It was unbelievably awful. I am embarrassed by what I wrote. NaNoWriMo encourages ZERO editing. Writers who have succeeded in the past claim that ignoring spelling and grammatical errors is key to maintaining momentum and grinding through the word count, day after day after day. Not only that, some of my friends have said that even writing stream of consciousness nonsense goes towards your word count - at the end of the day, it is all about the 50,000, no matter how you got there, and no matter how much of your 50K is coherent story. This was a concept I could not accept, and still cannot accept. Maybe my mistake was using a project I cared passionately about as my first (and now only) NaNo. I could not envision writing utter garbage for something I cared about, so I tried to be careful, and it did slow me down. So in the end, not only did I not complete NaNo, my writing was crap anyway, and I had to start from page one on draft number two. At 50,000 words of better work on my current draft, I am still only halfway there because the accepted length for the average novel is actually 90-120,000 words. 50,000 is closer to novella length.

The Ugly

-Sitting

-Burnout

My close friend (and now tech developer) Risto had been railing against sitting for long periods of time around the time I did NaNo. There is some good science that suggests sitting for more than two hours at a time does structural damage to the arteries in your legs and puts you at greater risk for cardiac problems. He had been encouraging me to get a standing desk for a while. NaNo finished the job well. I would sit for eight hours a day while writing, and while I have an exceedingly comfortable office chair, it was not enough. My knees were screaming by day twenty. I do not know how fast you can write 1,666 words on your tenth day in a row, but the more days I did NaNo, the slower going it went. It became a physically painful grind. Beyond sitting, it became a mental game too. Crushing that many words on one project, knowing they are bad, knowing that ultimately if you want to write an actual novel you will have to throw out the garbage that you are typing - it is a daunting mind game. Worse, when the month comes to an end, regardless of outcome, I did not want to write for months! It was not until April of 2013 when I sat down with my book again, on page one. I needed a huge break.

NaNoWriMo ended up being both a boon, by showing me that I could get a real start on this project, and was a major setback all at once.

So what to do? If you are having lots of false starts with your work, use National Novel Writing Month to kick start your efforts. Use it to get a rough idea of what you want down. Know that it takes up a lot of time and what you produce will not be good. You will hear some people claim that their writing from NaNo or similarly fast paced productions is good. I am skeptical, and we will leave it at that…

If you have done your NaNo, why not shoot for a more reasonable schedule. I would be satisfied to write 500 words a day, but it ends up being more like 1200 every 3-4 days. I think a consistent writing schedule is much more impressive than a grand writing sprint anyway, and that’s what NaNo taught me!