NaNoWriMo—M.G. Sondraal
D.M.K.Ruby introduced me to NaNoWriMo almost fifteen years ago now. For those of you who do not know about National Novel Writing Month, let me explain briefly. In the dreary, sodden, dull month of November with ever-shortening daylight, participants are challenged to write 50,000 words. To “win”, the pace of writing is a mere 1667 words daily for each of the 30 days.
Not much truthfully, unless you are fully employed, have parental responsibilities with meals to make, homework to check, basketball games to attend, and wish to have family members and life partners recognize you at the stroke of midnight on the 30th. If any, or indeed all, of these items are factors in your life, that arbitrary target is not easy to achieve. I’ve abandoned the project when life threw me one too many obstacles but have written the arbitrary number of words many times.
You suffer through it and compound your misery afterwards when the mountains of neglected laundry and drifts of cat hair need to be addressed. The pain continues in a physical sense with wrists, shoulders and back all protesting enforced inactivity and your stomach lining raw from countless cups of coffee.
And for what exactly?
One advantage of NaNoWriMo is the silencing of your inner editor, that nasty harpy wordsmithing every sentence and never satisfied. You don’t have time for her. The sole purpose of the exercise is to get the bare bones of the story on the page--beginning, middle and end. Completion of that story skeleton gives a framework for the first rough edit that expands your work to about 80,000 words and the beginning of the endless revisions necessary for a non-embarrassing readable work to share with friends and beta readers, before the more edits to develop the polished piece that sits on a hard-drive or in a drawer somewhere.
The disadvantages to NaNoWriMo are myriad beyond the physical and the domestic already outlined. The number is arbitrary, the deadline ridiculous and the result incomplete and horrendously flawed. You are not done at the end of it, so how can any sense of accomplishment be real? I intensely dislike the tyranny of the word count. As a creative, there are days when the words cascade in torrents onto the page and days when they are excavated as gold flake from hard rock with tremendous effort for miniscule results. It’s good to have a mix, to slow down through the difficult parts to get it right. I certainly don’t want to have a surfeit of words written to meet some foolish daily accounting that I’ll toss away on first edit because they don’t advance the storyline. That seems wasteful of time I don’t have to spare.
After consideration, NaNoWriMo has taught me two important lessons:
1. Temporarily silencing the inner critic is a catalyst for my storytelling. Get the story arc out. There’ll be gaps and redundancies, poor pacing, superfluous characters, and awkward language but that’s a problem for editing. Worry about that after the whole story is written. Otherwise, I’ll have a great first line, first paragraph, first page and nothing else.
2. Daily writing practice is a crucial habit for me. Now, I don’t write every day, but I write at least five days weekly and I research, think, and ruminate about stories seven days a week. I’m infinitely more productive with this routine than waiting for inspiration which usually coincided with basketball tournaments, dance recitals, and overwhelming work responsibilities and was lost into the ether.
Having learned these two things, NaNoWriMo has served its purpose. I do it now support deadline-dependent friends. I want to determine if I can write without a November start. I’m certain I can, if I can get this bloody editing done to my satisfaction.