NaNoWriMo Week 1

Here it is, Nov. 8, more than a week into one of the strangest writing events of the year: National Novel Writing Month. If you missed my earlier blog on NaNoWriMo, the short version is this. Write a novel in a month. Sign up on the official NaNoWriMo website and have your word count calculated. Complete 50,000 words between Nov. 1st and 30th and you get—well, nothing. But someday you can tell your grandchildren how you wrote a novel in month.

Silly as it sounds, it’s an international event, with approximately two gazillion people participating. I’m doing it this year for the first time.

Writing 50,000 words in 30 days means an average of 1,667 words a day. But I know there will be a few days I can’t write at all, so I’m aiming for 2,000 words on the days I can. So far, I’m going gangbusters: I’m over 16,000 words, beating my quota and on track for becoming a true WriMo.

And I’m learning a lot. Including:

1.Writing 2000 words a day is not nearly as hard or scary as it sounds as long as you follow one simple rule: Accept the fact that you’re going to write dogpoo. Nobody can write a good novel in one month. I strongly suspect that even Toni Morrison or Louise Erdrich or the amazingly prolific Stephen King could not write a good novel in a month. So give up on that from the beginning. The goal here isn’t to write well: It’s to write.

2.That said, sometimes when you stop worrying about writing well, you write better than when you are worrying about writing well.

3.Writing 2000 words of a novel every day is not the same as writing 2000 words of other stuff every day. It all has to hang together. It has to have a somewhat identifiable plot. It has to have characters that are more-or-less the same from one day to the next, and they have to be doing stuff that makes sense in some way. It’s not just that the 2000 words you write on Day 7 have to hang together. It’s that they also have to hang together with the 2000 words you wrote on Day 6 and the 2000 words you’re going to write on Day 8 and all the other 44,000 words you’re going to write all month.

4.There is something totally energizing about writing with 200,000 other people. Of course, at any given moment, someone, somewhere, is writing a novel. But during NaNoWriMo, you know they’re there. All of us WriMos are going onto the NaNoWriMo website. We’re all posting our work in the online word count verifier. We’re all getting the same NaNoWriMo pep talk emails. There’s a sense of community, of a shared challenge. We are all One in NaNoWriMo.

So, I’m back to my clunky, badly-paced, stunningly dull-witted NaNoWriMo novel. Only 34,000 words to go.