The Place For My Writers Notes

Original Posting 23 October 2011

Okay. National novel writing month, also known as nanowrimo or NaNoWriMo, starts up real soon now. November 1. 30 days to write 50,000 words.

The website is over here http://www.nanowrimo.org/

You can sign in, set up your account, even "Create Novel" -- which means writing down the novel title, genre, synopsis, and perhaps a short excerpt. But right now, we're really just getting ready. And yes, if you want to poke around without creating an account, take a look at http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/faq

But you might wonder why bother? After all, you can write any day of the year, or any month that you like. Absolutely true.

However, it's like running a marathon, doing it with other people gives you a little extra boost.

I think of it as a chance to practice. Practice setting aside the critic, that internal editor that insists on double checking every single word? Just tell him to wait, it's nanowrimo time. A chance to practice free writing, just letting it all pour out quickly. A chance to practice hitting a steady pace of writing, with a regular quota, aiming at 50,000 words or more in one month.

It's a chance to lay out a novel-sized idea, and the daily or weekly or whatever smaller ideas to fill out that big idea. You can try out three act structure, character arcs, all of that fun theory. Put it to work in practice.

A chance to learn? I think I can guarantee that if you try it, you will learn some things. If you keep going and finish, that's good! But even if you don't, you'll have a better understanding of what it means to write. Steadily, regularly, towards a goal of so many words.

Another way to look at it is that it's just one month. I mean, if you are looking at writing a novel in a year, that's a huge commitment of time! This is just one month. That's not so daunting. Of course, it's also true that doing something for a month can help establish a habit. And the habit of regular production writing certainly can't be bad for a writer, now can it?

A chance to practice writing, a chance to try out those ideas, and a chance to learn. For just a month of commitment? Sounds like a bargain to me. What about you? Why are you going to do nanowrimo?

Why not do it? Well, the inner critic wants to point out that letting a flood of crud out might not be the best idea. Of course, I'm not sure that keeping it inside makes it any easier to clean up. At least once it's on the page, you've got a better chance to revise it. But that's an argument you and your inner critic need to have.

Incidentally, nobody else has to see what you write. All you have to put into nanowrimo is the word count. Yes, there is a word count validator, but the main thing is just to keep the running word count updated on the website. You don't have to beat anybody, no one will come around and ask why you didn't write yesterday, it's very much a self inflicted discipline.

I suppose another reason not to do nanowrimo is that it doesn't give you practice or guidelines for getting ready, planning, actually finishing your work beyond hitting the goal of 50,000 words, revision, submission, and all the other stuff.

And, of course, November has Thanksgiving. And you need to put the shutters up for the winter. And... It's really easy to come up with reasons not to do something, isn't it?

Anyway, some thoughts. I think the main reason to do nanowrimo really is that you want to. If you don't want to, that's all right. Like a marathon, workshop, and most of the other things in life, it's not for everybody. But if you want to try running a few laps -- grinding out some of that 50,000 words or more -- then you might want to start stretching now. Just so that you can get ready for the starting gun next week.

(About 690 words, but who's counting :-)