The NaNoWriMo logo/coat of arms.
Well, it’s December 1st. That means a couple of things: start of the holiday season and prep for the new year, the days get to their shortest point, I try to push a tag with the hope that it will become a trend (so far, it’s been hit and miss with those I’ve tagged). For writers around the world, however, it means National Novel Writing Month, and assessing how each person did and how their manuscripts turned out.
I’ve actually always found National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short, full of strange contradictions. For one thing, it takes place around the world, but it’s kept “national.” Heck, even the month’s official website puts you in touch with participants from all over the world! Why don”t we change the name?
For another thing, it’s amazing how many authors take this challenge seriously. For those of you who don’t know, during the month of November, many writers try to write a fifty-thousand word novel within 30 days (that’s about 1667 words per day if you want the math). And I’ve seen so many author friends on Facebook and in blogs lament how they only got so many words down. “I only got eight-thousand words.” “I was so close to 50K!” “This NaNoWriMo sucked! I hardly got any work done.” I don’t even want to know what they thought of the material they wrote.
Just for clarification, there’s no actual prize if you write a 50K novel in 30 days. You just get bragging rights. But plenty of authors see it as a reflection of themselves if they can’t get the words down. And I actually kind of understand this: on nights when I didn’t write anything down (and those nights occurred quite often, sadly), I felt like it was some sort of reflection on my skills or on myself as a writer. It didn’t matter if there just wasn’t enough time before bed, or if I had a book I really wanted to read, or if I just didn’t feel like writing that night. I felt bad. Maybe not as bad as I could have felt, I have a day job that takes up a good chunk of time, so I at least have an excuse for why I’m not writing more. But I bet for those who write full-time, it could be very frustrating when they didn’t reach their goals.
So how did I do, now that we’re on the subject? Well, I knew that with a job and that unfortunate habit of sleeping seven hours a night, plus eating and bill-paying and grocery shopping and everything else that goes on in my life, I had only so much time to do any work. Therefore, I decided that I would keep my expectations reasonable. I decided that I would aim to get ten-thousand words done, and if I got past that, I would aim for another five-thousand afterwards. If I somehow managed to get past that, I’d aim for five-thousand more, and so on and so forth. The result was I probably felt less stress than my colleagues, and I consequently met my first goal, and got more than halfway to my second goal.
To be exact, I got 13,821 words down by the end of the month, about four-and-a-half chapters worth of story. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to do it. How did it turn out? Well, I guess as well as a first draft can turn out. I mean, it’s only in the subsequent drafts that novels actually become the brilliant stories we all hold so dear. During the first drafts, they’re like pre-Fairy Godmother Cinderella: full of beauty and potential but in need of some serious clean up. My own NaNoWriMo project, Full Circle, has a lot of good stuff in it so far. It’s the third book in my Reborn City series, and considering that I started this series about eight years ago, this novel is already showing my growth over that time the most more than any recent story I’ve written.
Still, I think Chapter 1 could use a lot of clean-up. There’s a lot of exposition there, so making it work with the real storytelling moments is important. And possibly the prologue could use some polish as well. Yeah, I included a prologue with this book. New thing for this series, but I think it’s good for this book. Just needs some edits.
In the meantime though, I still have an entire novel to finish, and it’ll probably be a lot longer than 50K. I’m hoping that I can finish it by mid-spring 2017, and have it out early 2018 at the latest. We’ll see what happens.
Well, that’s all for now. Unless there’s something worth posting about, I’ll try to put out a Writing/Reflections-themed post out at some point during that month. In the meantime, it’s writing, writing, writing, and hopefully a lot of it.
Until next time, my Followers of Fear!
Rami Ungar The Writer 
Congrats on your 13K words! I managed to hit the 50K, but not with one story. The book I started writing at the beginning wasn’t going to be 50K, and I refused to pad it to make it, so I also wrote part of a short story I’ve been meaning to write. It wasn’t exactly by the book, but all’s fair in love and writing.
I don’t think there’s even a book to go by (but if there was, it would have been 50K or so). But it’s the sort of event where you can bend the rules quite a bit, so what the hell? Do what thou wilt, and enjoy it whilst thou do it.
I made the goal the way I usually do; by doing a big chunk in the last two or three days. The truth is if I look through all of my NaNo data for years, I don’t write daily – i write a lot one day, skip days, write a bunch, skip days, so my charts always look like a staircase, then at the end I write a big bunch. I’m to the point now where I “have” to finish it simply because I always have (when I have participated) and can’t stand to ruin the streak, ha ha! As for the quality – 90% of it needs rewritten, and the whole first chapter needs reworked as I realized part way in that one of the characters owns an airplane (‘doh!) but since I am a panster I write that way even without NaNo, the difference is normally I backtrack and rewrite it when I notice, as opposed to leaving it with a note tacked to the side that says “fix later”. But I look at NaNo not as something to write a full book in, but as something to get me far enough into the book that it’s gotten interesting enough that I want to get it finished. Which in reality means I’ll put it off until January when I’ll start writing like mad because I need to have the book to betas in february 😉 You know, wait til the last minute :p
If I tried writing 90% of my book in the last couple of days, I’d probably need an IV full of nutrients and drugs to keep me from getting distracted. By the end of it, I’d be sleep-deprived and minus thumbs, but I’d have a finished novel. Way to go on keeping that from happening. 😉
Lol! Yeah, I spend Dec 1st sleeping :p
Lucky! I had to go into work and yawn most of the morning!