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NANOWRIMO: So You Want To Write a Novel (And By-God You Mean It This Time!)
AManFromEarth
Let's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered User regular
Let's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered User regular
Elections, turkey dinners, poppy appeals, and mustaches. November certainly has it all. But wouldn't it be great if you could also write a first draft of the Great American Novel (people from Not America are also welcome to join in)? Well now, and since 1999 you can!
The National Novel Writing Month is a thing started by people to encourage development of and appreciation for the written word. The idea is that between November 1 and November 30 each participant will have completed a first draft of a 50k word manuscript. Like all fist drafts it will suck ass and you'll be horribly ashamed of it, but it'll be there, which is the hardest part. Literally trillions of people sign up for it and of that number almost dozens complete the project, so don't feel bad if you fall a bit short (though you totally should, you word scrub).
To learn more or set up an account head over to the website here. You can track it on the site or just join in here on PA.
The National Novel Writing Month is a thing started by people to encourage development of and appreciation for the written word. The idea is that between November 1 and November 30 each participant will have completed a first draft of a 50k word manuscript. Like all fist drafts it will suck ass and you'll be horribly ashamed of it, but it'll be there, which is the hardest part. Literally trillions of people sign up for it and of that number almost dozens complete the project, so don't feel bad if you fall a bit short (though you totally should, you word scrub).
To learn more or set up an account head over to the website here. You can track it on the site or just join in here on PA.
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You also may not be surprised to find out we've been talking about it over in the Writer's Block.
I have written nothing.
nothing.
this is very abnormal for me.
I haven't even opened Word yet.
this is so not going to go well.
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That's actually pretty much the best way to do it. That way you're still flexible on directions the sequels could grow/change in, but when your publisher comes looking for number two you're not like, "What now? Oh shit!" and turn out a crap* pile.
It's times like this I realize that I have absolutely no natural talent for this.
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For perhaps the first time I have the characters of a story fleshed out before I have an inkling about the plot
This seems like the best way to approach NaNoWriMo: naive and innocent souls happily embarked on a horrific crash course with deadlines and destiny
Combine this with my resurgent desire to start writing again and I'm going to at least make a decent stab at this
It won't be a decent story, mind you. Just a decent stab.
i'm up to 540!
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In just about 1 hour I've pounded out 3940 words.
that feels good.
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Now I'm picking it up and I'm just sort of going to wing it once I get to the second half.
I'm 2414 words in this morning, with a shitty prologue which may get tossed and a good 50% of my first chapter.
Hopefully this will be my second completed novel.
Round two has involved writing absolutely nothing so far this morning. I'm going to need more coffee.
Of course, may not be an option if you're writing in the morning.
Caffeine gets me wired and antsy and makes it harder for me to sit still and write. Just a little alcohol for some reason opens up my creativity a lot.
I find my writing usually ends up being a combination of garbage, and straight up plagarism of writing that I already like.
Godspeed, take to your wings and fly to the heavens. I'll be here on solid earth cheering you on and hoping that one day, maybe, I find my wings.
Yeah, definitely a good tip. I always found it so much easier to write anything, from creative stuff to essays at uni, alongside a rum or a glass of wine. It really does open up that creativity, like you say. Inhibiting the inhibitors and all that jazz.
The coffee was more about waking me up this morning. Not that I actually have any rum in the flat at the moment, but I'm not sure it'd go well with breakfast.
While I can understand the intent behind the nanowrimo folks' anti-editing sentiment I feel like their drive for quantity over quality has gone entirely too far. Writing is a far more personal thing than many challenging hobbies one might undertake and it's no skin off my nose if a few thousand people are vomiting incoherent drivel or literally copying the same paragraph over and over to increase their word counts, but what's the point?
If you have any degree of willpower, two hours or so a day that you can carve out as free time somewhere in your schedule, a reasonable command of your native language, and at least a vague idea of what you want to write, 50 thousand words in 30 days is really not much. It's 1700 words a day. This post is already up over 200 words and has taken me a couple of minutes to write. If you actually want to write a novel there is nothing stopping you from doing it besides yourself.
Nanowrimo is a wonderful excuse to cut out some of your other hobbies and distractions for a month and focus on building a writing habit. But the intense focus of the actual event on word count over all else, with the quantity-focused tips and pep talks, the word count competitions on their forums, and the attitude that spewing out 50,000 words of nonsense is a big accomplishment turn me right off. Then, last year, their giant push for donations on the basis that they had anticipated vastly more growth than was in any way rational and were not going to meet their funding goals. I don't know how The Office of Letters and Light is run but I'm going to go ahead and venture to say, "Not well." Perhaps their new head honcho will avoid the funding disaster this year (not that they don't rake in a shit ton of money last year; it was more than they'd made in any previous year...just not the 30% or something growth that they'd projected for no obviously rational reason).
Last year left such a sour taste in my mouth about nanowrimo as an organization that I did my novel writing month two months ago (though it wound up stretching to six weeks or so since I had a lot more to write than I initially realized). Maybe this will be the year that nanowrimo's community becomes more about writing and less about literary dick-measurement and next year I can join back in.
Anyway. Writing is great, writing a novel is hard, and I salute everyone working on it this month. Don't confuse my bitching about the event organizers and their attitude for criticism of what you're doing.
I do hope to do this one year, though.
I'm a huge believer in the idea that almost nobody is going to write anything that isn't garbage on their first try, and probably not their second try either. To expect to write a masterpiece on your first try would be like expecting somebody who's never played piano before to sit down for the first time and bang out some Chopin. In reality, not only are you not going to play a masterpiece, you're going to probably be sitting there mangling Chopsticks and nobody is going to want to hear it past the first 10 seconds.
If you haven't finished a novel before but you've "always wanted to be a writer", then it's a good idea just to get words on paper, get it out of your system, prove to yourself that you can in fact write 50,000+ words of fiction. The idea is precisely to avoid getting too hung up on your first piece of work and trying to make it great when you are as yet incapable of greatness.
Let's face it, anybody who has finished half a dozen novels doesn't need Nano anymore. It's not for them. At that point, if your quality still sucks, it's time to sit there and learn about writing fiction from better writers than yourself. It's time to, as you mentioned, start focusing more on revision. Maybe it's time to experiment with different methods or genres; if you've been writing horror, try mystery or science fiction. If you've been discovery writing, give outlining a try. Heck, maybe it's even time to pay $texas for one of those fancy writer's workshops where you learn from the pros.
Focused practice is only useful when you've got the actually practicing at all part down.
The idea is to get over the biggest hurdle, getting shit on the page.
You shouldn't be editing your writing mid draft anyway.
Maybe December should be Nanoedmo.
I haven't written a word of it in two years now. I know how the story goes. I don't have writers' block. The story is just too soul-crushing to devote any more time to, at least right now.
Agree!
Aren't there enough Romney biographies on the market by now?
Notice, I said "little means," though.
Not to derail, so, I'm giving NaNo a shot this year. Haven't really written anything substantial in quite a few years, but I spent the last week hashing out a plot; I've got a plan, a keyboard, and I'm unemployed so maybe the planets are in alignment?
February is officially Nanoedmo I believe. I know that one exists! :P
I have been doing Nano since '07, but last year was the first year I actually managed the 50k. The story isn't even half done, though, so this year I am continuing that same story. Last night I was transferring the document over to Scrivener from Google Docs and building up the character and setting descriptions (Scrivener is great for novel writing!). It was the first time I've looked at last year's story since last year. I have to say, I'm pretty good at this. :P
However, I have not yet had a chance to write anything, so tonight, we dance!
I believe January is technically Nanoedmo, to give you some distance from your work and what with Christmas and New Years in there.
You shouldn't edit, no, at least not in the sense of serious editing, but there are dozens if not hundreds of places around the nanowrimo page and forums where you will find people exhorting that you abstain from ever deleting anything--even to the point of not fixing spelling mistakes.
I understand that the point is to just get over the mental block presented by such a large number of words and/or the blank page but I don't understand the point of working on a single project for a month and pouring out half or more of the length of a full novel draft in something that you will never want to touch again. Especially for people who have done (and perhaps finished) nanowrimo before.
Shoveling out 50k words of maybe-drek, sure, because you have to (as someone was alluding to above) get through your fabled half a million words of shit before you reach quality prose. But why go to the point of creating 50k words of completely worthless garbage by re-typing paragraphs when you can't think of something new to write? Or leaving misspelled words in place and then typing the correct spelling aftward? Or re-writing scenes but leaving the original draft in place? Or including scenes that you know for a fact before you even begin are irrelevant and will not survive the first revision?
These are all sage words of wisdom I have seen either given directly on the nanowrimo site or praised on the forums.
I fully support the idea of encouraging new writers to just write and not worry too much about plot coherency or strong prose or good characterization. Even spelling and grammar can go by the wayside in favor of just putting story on pages. My problem arises from the depths to which the nanowrimo organizers encourage folks to sink. The environment just seems so anti-quality and so toxic to trying to do a good job at writing--as opposed to doing a good job at typing a lot of words--that I don't see how a prospective writer can reasonably come out of nanowrimo with a draft that might become a real novel one day unless he or she has the self-discipline and awareness to eventually start ignoring what their fellow nanos and the nanowrimo staff are telling them.
Come January and editing time, the majority of November Novelists are not only not going to actually do anything with that manuscript draft on their harddrive. Which is okay. Not everyone is a writer and not everyone who writes does it with the intent that other people should read their work. But for those who do want to go on into editing and revision, following the nano folks' advice is likely to leave them with a document that essentially needs to be rewritten from scratch.
True, though I often find my second drafts are better served as post-edit rewrites anyway.
To each their own, I suppose. I know the attitude you're talking about though, and I've railed against it before (most recently in Chat last week I believe). I see NANOWRIMO like college writing courses, sure you're not going to get 100% For Serious writers, but it's gonna help out that one or two person struggling to get something out, and it might help people discover something new about themselves.
I would certainly join you in saying come editing time we should encourage people to get out that red pen!
I got a bunch of days off now, not in til Tuesday. Gonna totally write some words.
If someone's goal is to be a published author, Nano is a great tool to get over the wall of self-doubt that can kill a project partway through.
Anyway, I've already got plans to completely rewrite the prologue and first chapter of my story come the second draft. I just need to finish the first draft before I do that, though.
Though, having a newborn likely means I will crash and burn, I haven't written anything in about 2 years, so, anything will be an improvement on that.
I don't begrudge anyone their content. Slashfic, furry erotica, cozy mysteries, harlequin-style romance, whatever. Not by bag, but you do what you wanna do. Hell, I don't even begrudge people their bad writing. Horrible grammar, misused words, scattershot puncutation, spelling so bad that Word can't even figure it out--whatever. No skin off my nose. Hell, if you really want to just write "All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy." for 300 pages for some reason, go for it.
What people do in the privacy of their own word processors is their deal. If you want to invite other people in to read your stuff, more power to you. If you don't and you have no aspirations to professionalism then that's fine too.
I just dislike the attitude of nanowrimo. The idea that it literally doesn't matter what you do for 50k words, just that you make the progress bar fill up within the allotted time. I don't understand it. Sure it can help people get started. It helped me. But as time goes on it seems like the event's anti-serious-business attitude is growing stronger and stronger over time. Maybe it's just that I'm getting more serious about writing; maybe it's that the community is getting larger; maybe I'm just getting more grumpy in my old age. I don't know.
Last year a group of us got run off of the boards by a pissed off admin for discussing quality vs. quantity. Basically the idea being that our attitude that what you wrote was as important if not more important than the number of words written was offending people. No pointed fingers, no called names; just the philosophy that your content is actually important was offensive. I was personally told that if I was writing Serious Business and was interested in getting published nanowrimo wasn't for me and I should go find some other event to take part in.
Hell, they deleted one of the early pep talks because a subset of the community misunderstood the talk author as implying that you should pay attention to quality. The talk didn't actually say that. It was following the nano creed but could be misconstrued as extolling the virtues of thinking before you type. So they yanked it down and replaced it with a More Words Faster OMG Add A Ninja screed. (I think; I may be imagining the replacement screed. I know they redacted the peptalk.)
So now I'm just not sure who nano is for. If it's not people who are or want to be passionate about writing, what is it? The Office of Lights and Letters that runs nanowrimo is nominally a literacy-promotion organization. Promoting literacy through writing seems like it requires some degree of paying attention to your content's quality.
And mostly if you aren't doing Nano and don't like the idea of it why are you coming in here and being a Debbie Downer?
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Can't be many of those going around now, eh?
How's this;
Am I novelling correctly!? I don't know!