National Novel Writing Month (most commonly known as NaNoWriMo) starts next week. For those unfamiliar with the idea, it started as a straightforward challenge: During the month of November, complete 50,000 words of a novel. In the past 24 years, it’s grown into a huge community of writers and would-be writers, with multiple people providing pep talks and coaching advice on how to successfully complete the challenge. Quite a few people have eventually sold or self-published work that began as a NaNoWriMo project, and there are a fair number of professional writers who use the annual challenge informally, to give a boost to whatever they happen to be working on at the moment.
Some years, the annual challenge makes hardly a ripple in my life; other years, it seems as if every person I meet wants advice on whether they should try it. This is one of the latter years, and the questions fall into two camps: 1. People who want to do NaNoWriMo, but who have heard other writers make extremely critical comments about it, and 2. People who are worried that they aren’t good enough to do it yet, that they’ll fail, that they can’t write that fast, that they can’t write well that fast, that they won’t be able to put in the time…basically, every excuse ever made for not starting to write at any time of the year, only cranked up a notch or two.
Personally, I have little to no sympathy for the critics of the challenge, mainly because I think most of their criticisms miss the point. I do have sympathy for the editors who get a huge stack of unpolished 50,000-word manuscripts showing up in their slush piles in December, but that’s not really a problem with the challenge. If anything, it shows how effective the challenge is at getting would-be writers to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, and actually write something instead of just talking about it.
The value of NaNoWriMo isn’t in the amount of great literature it encourages; it’s in getting people past some of the really basic process problems that prevent so many of them from sitting down and doing it. A lot of these are problems with confidence or with overthinking the process of writing—everything has to be perfect; it’s perfectly reasonable to spend an entire day deciding to add a comma, and the entire following day deciding to remove it; the first draft has to be perfect; the outline has to be perfect; the writer has to chase down and develop every interesting new character and/or subplot the minute it occurs to them; none of the writing will be any good if it isn’t “inspired”; the writer isn’t good enough to even try writing a novel (though how they think they’re going to get good enough without ever writing anything is beyond me).
Committing to the NaNoWriMo challenge means committing to writing an average of 1,667 words each and every day for an entire month. Any serious attempt at doing this does not leave the writer with time to worry about whether every word is right, every comma is golden, whether they are “good enough” to be doing this, or whether their story “should” go in some other direction. (This should be obvious from the amount of “NaNo Prep” advice that is devoted to things like keeping your house/apartment livable for a month even when you’re not cleaning it, or how not to live on fast food, takeout, and no sleep for the entire month—obviously, these NaNo Prep coaches realize that a lot of people are getting their NaNo writing time by cutting back on cooking, cleaning, laundry, and sleep.)
In addition, the community accountability—having a bunch of people asking whether you made today’s word count and/or congratulating you on having done so—is exceedingly useful for lots of people. (And if it isn’t, for you, you can always “do NaNo” without actually signing up, and just track your wordcount privately in an Excel spreadsheet to stay on track.) The web site’s emphasis is on the simple challenge—keep the words coming, til you get to 50,000—rather than on how you get to your target words-per-day, but one can run into people who are convinced that the way they are doing NaNo is the only way anyone can succeed at doing NaNo. Having been warned that they exist, one can either tell them “I’ll remember that if my word count falls behind,” or just straight-up ignore them.
Because of all this, I generally advise doubters to go ahead and try, provided that a) they are pretty sure they are not the sort of writer who is going to be devastated and/or convinced they have failed if they only make it to 49,997 words in 30 days instead of 50,000, b) they are not going to worry that they have “done it wrong” if some stranger online says so (even if they made the 50K words), and c) they have never done it before.
A writer who has done NaNoWriMo before should already know whether they found it worth doing, and if they have doubts about doing it a second/third/fifth/ninth time, maybe they should skip a year or two. Some people find it enormously useful to have a “zeroth draft month” every year or so, in which they slam out something that they can then revise into a rough draft (and, eventually, into a publishable novel). Other people, having gone through it once, shift focus from “can I even do this?” to “I have to win!” This generally means that they start padding their word count with infodumps and super-detailed description in order to make it to 50,000 words, which has the exact opposite effect of what NaNo was intended for (i.e., the writer gets into bad habits around the prose they produce, instead of into good ones around sitting down and writing).
I, for one, will not be doing NaNoWriMo this year. That particular challenge is one I’d prefer to take on in one of the summer months, when I don’t have school assignments begging for my attention; and when I haven’t just done approximately 50K words of revisions on the current WIP in under two weeks and am somewhat burnt-out as a result. I’m perfectly happy to use November to take a bit of a break from writing and recharge so I can hit it hard again over Christmas Break. Besides, I have a great many hats to make before Christmas, so it’s not like I’m going to be bored. 😉
I thought I’d sworn off Nanowrimo after my 2 disastrous attempts, but I’m actually thinking of trying it again, with a take of it being some kind of overall weekly word count goal where I apply a hearty dollop of the “fail to success” mindset that makes all kinds of failed goals which produce large amounts of success worth doing. (My first attempt at a daily poetry goal resulted in 77 poems that year, which was a success, despite it being dramatically shy of 365.)
I don’t do daily word count goals due to chronic health making some days just total losses, but weekly seems entirely feasible to kickstart me into more substantial action again.
Yeah, I don’t think daily wordcount goals are always feasible. There are some days when I just don’t have the energy for writing, even if I’ve got the time, and so I do something else instead. Good luck to you!
I never sign up.
I may do it this year to increase wordage on a work that is looking to be long.
I did NaNoWriMo a few times and found it worthwhile. The realization that thousands of people around the world (It really should be International Novel Writing Month) are participating in the same thing you are is energizing, to say the least, and doing the challenge engrains deeply in your soul the notion that, yes, you can really write a Whole Lot of Words in a short time (even if you do not reach the 50k goal). That’s a valuable belief to have.
I dropped it when I started putting down words just to make the word count (mostly stream-of-consciousness crap and writting about writing); I do, however, recommend any writer to try NaNoWriMo at least once.
I have that problem with word count goals. Maybe I should make scene count goals… Hmm…
I did it once with a rushed outline. Never again. . . .
I’m 95% decided that I’m doing NaNo this year. Waiting until the last minute to officially commit makes the ridiculous wordcounts less intimidating, somehow.
NaNo has its merits, but it’s not for everyone — or every book. I’ve done it twice before and been pleased with the results both times, but this year I’ll be writing a very different sort of story. We’ll see how that works out, but I definitely need a kick in the pants to get my writing habit back where it should be, and this seems as likely to provide that as anything.
Good luck!
I recommend unofficially committing.
Ah, but it’s the public commitment (and thus potential for publicly visible failure) that keeps me motivated. Not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, and that’s fine. But it works for me.
Thx, E. Beck!
I commit among people I know.
I’ve decided long since that NaNoWriMo is not for me. It doesn’t fit my process at all, and I don’t have to prove that I can write novels.
What I’ve found useful is a resolution to show up at the page every day. I keep a file of the days I did NOT show up at the page, and I’ve been able to keep that down to 30-35 days per year. And now I WISH I had started ten or twenty years ago instead of just 3 years ago.
A few years ago, I talked a friend (Andrew Dolbeck) into doing NaNoWriMo. His effort eventually resulted in a four-book deal with a small press – The Witch Seasons series: Fever Jenny; Halloween Ladies; Night Falls, and Snow; and Magic Jack’s Last Quest.
My copy of Fever Jenny is enscribed “For the clever wolf who tossed the pebble that became the avalanche”.
I attempted it last year, and by “attempted” I mean “tried to write a little every day but didn’t get anywhere near 50k words.” The sense of community was the most rewarding and encouraging part, for me. Even knowing I had virtual buddies sitting and getting themselves to write simultaneously made a huge difference. I might do that again.
I’ve done NaNo twice and it mainly drove home that if I don’t know enough about my setting and characters, I can write a nice beginning but it never will connect with a satisfying ending.
This year, though, I have a whole longish short story that plopped into my head all in a piece, and I may try that (unofficially).