#NaNoWriMo

#NaNoWriMo

No, that’s not what Patricia Neal said to the alien robot to keep from getting incinerated.

An Explanation for People who Need Explanations

For the normal people among you who don’t spend your days staring at computer screens thinking of new and elaborate ways to torment a bunch of fictional people, I’ll explain—#NaNoWriMo is the hashtag for National Novel Writing Month, which is November. The month just past.
I have no idea whose idea this was or where it came from, but the goal for those who take part is to start from scratch (more or less) on Nov. 1, and have 50,000 words by the time Dec. 1 rolls around. Since thirty days hath November, you need to be averaging 1,666.66… words/day if you want to ring the #NaNoWriMo bell. (Slightly more if you plan to take a day off in the middle for Thanksgiving, but obviously only a wuss would do that.)
Sixteen hundred words a day isn’t all that rugged, provided you don’t do a whole lot of editing as you go. I am just such a writer. I just want to get it down and get on to the next bit.
If I’m clanking away at something, thinking “this really needs to be set up somewhere back in chapter 2.” I don’t go back. I make a big ol’ note right there, a note I can’t miss (bold, italics, flush right with a fat red box around it): “Set this up in ch. 2.” And I keep on rattling the keyboard, moving ever forward, laying down words like railroad track.
I might even be banging away, thinking “Hell’s bells, this stinks so bad.”
I do not let that stop me.
My motto: “Write through the garbage.” I figure I have the rest of my life to come back and fix it.
That said, 1,600 words/day is easily do-able, which is probably why whoever set this challenge up set it up that way.

My Process:

When I’m drafting, I actually budget a mere 1,500/day, knowing I’ll make it easily. I regularly exceed 3,000. A glance through my journals shows I once cranked out 5,200 words in a day and I felt like Barbara frigging Cartland.
Accomplishing the daily wordage is, for me anyway, no big woop.
But here’s the thing—I don’t start a novel by sitting down at my desk and typing Chapter 1. That way lies madness. I start a novel by having an idea, and then I stare out the window, hoping for more ideas. For weeks. I need a good chunk of time to gather thoughts, imagine events, steal stuff, discard stuff, and refine the stuff I keep.
Given that I’m writing romantic comedies, I have an obvious target to write toward:

• Boy-gets-boy.

I have a pretty good idea where I need to begin, to wit:

• Boy-meets-boy.

(Note, I'm working backwards.)
Everything that might happen in between goes on 4x6 cards, and I push those cards around until I have a sequence that makes sense, that gets me logically, credibly and amusingly to Point Z from Point A.
Only when I have that loose outline do I begin the process of drafting.
If I actually started from nothing on Nov. 1, the word total come December would be somewhere around zero-point-nil.
And I can knock out those high daily word counts only while I’m drafting—which I do for about six weeks before I find myself dabbing at my eyes with a tissue, typing the last lines of the book.
After the eye-dabbing and last lines and self-bestowed back-pats, the second part of the job begins: Rewriting all the crap in that first draft.
The problem with polishing is that it can’t be measured in word counts. I changed “ran down the stairs” to “rabbited down the two flights.” The net word gain was minimal. The improvement was huge.
I spent six weeks writing my first book, and then spent the next nine months rewriting it. During that second period, I would duly note the word count at the start of each day, and generally I would have picked up 100-150 words on the previous day. My point being: You can’t (or least I can’t) write 1600 words a day, every damned day.

Back to #NaNoWriMo

The idea of setting yourself that 50,000-words-in-a-month goal is fine, at least for the drafting phase. The biggest problem I have with it is the month has been randomly picked for you.
What if November’s there and you’re not ready to start drafting?
What if you’re ready to rock and roll in April? Do you sit on your book until November, just so you can be one of the hip #NaNoWriMo kids? That makes no sense.
I don’t want to take anything away from anybody here. If #NaNo is a helpful tool for you, terrific. If it gets you to move from thinking about a book to writing a book—cool beans.
For most novelists, writing is a lonely business. We sit alone all day listening to people in our heads. I’m lucky—I have a Scottish terrier to bounce ideas off, which is obviously beyond awesome—but lots of writers don’t (sad, but true).
So somebody invented #NaNoWriMo to give a sense of community (no matter how artificial or arbitrary it might be) to a bunch of people, who otherwise work in lonely isolation; a place to tweet your daily word tally and maybe get a few hearts for it.
But I don’t think I’m ever going to play along. Trying to schedule a book to happen in November—and only in November—doesn’t make any sense to this little writer-boy.

And the dog agrees with me.