This is the magic of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as it’s more affectionately dubbed.
Why we share such affection for this crazy month is a mystery. To pull off such a remarkable feat, we must complete a book, from scratch, in the limited time frame of 30 days. That it comes smack dab in the middle of a holiday month and, for me at least, a birthday month, means that most of us will cram whatever writing we can wherever we can, amidst all the real-world distractions.
The objective for NaNoWriMo sounds simple enough. Write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Broken down, that’s about 1667 words per day towards your goal. For writers like Stephen King, who recommend a set number of words we should be writing daily anyway, this pace isn’t all that break-neck… until you actually have to sit down at your computer and write the words. Some days the words don’t come. Some days, you have to carve them out with a dull butter knife just to form a coherent sentence. Some days, it’s daunting enough to write a grocery list. So what sounds like a simple thing, adding a few hours to your day to write 1667 words, often is quite the struggle.
Of the hundreds of thousands of intrepid writers who begin this journey, only a small percentage ever “win,” which is to say they finished at least 50,000 words by November’s end. Per Wikipedia, in 2014, 325,142 people participated in the event, but only 58,917 completed it, which is a little over 18%.
This is not a journey for the fainthearted.
I have participated in NaNoWriMo since 2004, where I wrote my novel via my MySpace blog, just to see if I could pull it off. I did, which was a huge accomplishment for me. Back then, when I wasn’t writing full-time, I had only written about four full-length novels over the course of thirteen years, thanks to full-time jobs, raising a family, falling in and out of love, and managing life in general.
This is the way a lot of people think it should work. They think that novels must simmer and percolate, each word chosen carefully by the steadfast wordsmith who would never, in her wildest dreams or worst nightmares, dare write the sheer and utter crap that must be mined in order to complete a book on such a breakneck deadline.
But the truth is that nothing prepared me for my career as a full-time writer quite like Nanowrimo.
The truth is, when you’re an author who depends on what you write to live, to survive… to eat… you learn how to write per the seemingly outrageous deadlines given to you by people who don’t have to sit down at that computer and carve each carefully chosen word out of their arse with a dull butter knife. Editors, publishers, producers and fans all want the same thing – a completed project in their hand.
If you’re one of the 18% who can pull it off, Nanowrimo teaches you how to get from the starting gate to the finish line.
Over the past eleven years, I have participated in Nanowrimo nine times. I “won” eight times. The only time I didn’t cross the finish line was when the book I was writing ended five thousand words before the cut-off. (It was middle-grade book.) Thanks to Nanowrimo, I no longer waited for a wild hair to start a book; I hit the ground running with a definite goal and a battle plan to make it happen. We’re hard-wired to want to win things, which is why the way Nano works is so genius. Because what it takes to win is so simple, that’s even more genius.
Simply write 1667 words a day. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.
No matter what process a writer uses to complete a book, the basic work to do so is rather universal. Just put one word in front of the other. We’re building a brick wall, essentially, and every word is a brick to use. If you give yourself a goal of how many bricks you’re going to lay per day, eventually, when enough time has elapsed, you’re going to be able to stand back and see the bigger picture. For Nano, this is a book with your name on it.
It’s going to take some work; I am not going to lie. There are going to be some days when you’re exhausted and everything in the world that can go wrong in your life will, but your incomplete manuscript will whisper in your ear all month long, “We can do this. Just sit down and write.” Whether you will or are even able to answer that call remains to be seen. But having that deadline looming on November 30 like a bright neon Vegas sign that can be seen from outer space often forces you to make those harder decisions just to get the job done.
This is an amazing education of what will be expected of you when you become a full-time, professional writer. If that’s your ultimate goal, I really can think of no better training ground.
Now, there are those who disparage this writing marathon, who believe that a few hundred thousand writers typing like crazy to meet such a deadline only adds to the pile of sludge we all have to navigate since the birth of self-publishing (which, let’s be honest, was a tricky minefield even before self-publishing became the “norm.”) These people miss the point entirely. If you think you’re going to have a marketable book within thirty days, you’re deluding yourself, particularly if you’re a brand new writer.
All Nano sets out to show you is that you can complete a writing goal. This is only the very first little baby step to get you on your way.
But it is a very necessary baby step. You’re never going to launch your career as a writer if you can’t finish a book. You can have ideas for days on what kinds of stories you’d tell, but until you actually do what it takes to tell them, you’re nothing but someone with a bunch of ideas.
To be a writer, you must write. To be a professional author, you must have completed books to sell. Otherwise you’re just paid to talk about how you’d like to be a writer, and that’s not the same thing, no matter what some authors might try to do to circumvent the process. (Looking at you, James Frey.)
So here we are, November 1st, the starting gate. You have an idea. You’ve always wanted to write a book, and 50,000 words isn’t all that daunting when you consider that most mainstream novels are 80,000 words or more.
All you have to do to “win” Nano is to write 50,000. That’s 1667 words a day.
I’ll make a bold claim here. I think you can do it. I don’t know you. I don’t know your particular skill or where you are as a writer. I don’t know what your idea is for a book, or what your life looks like in order to carve out the time to write it. All of that is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that if you put one word in front of the other, with a goal of 1667 words a day, you can “win” this challenge. I believe in you so much that I have decided to use my entire November to write a book on how to navigate the murky, treacherous waters of Nanowrimo and come out the other side, a little battered and sleep-deprived maybe, but a winner nonetheless.
You won’t be a winner because you’ll write a masterpiece in thirty days, one that will immediately launch your epic, enviable career as a best-selling writer. No one can promise you that, and you should regard anyone suspiciously who tells you otherwise.
But I can tell you how to finish a book. Since my first Nano in 2004, I’ve written 27 full-length novels. As a self-publisher, I impose my own deadlines, and I’m a bit of a sadist. Unfortunately I have to be, as I am a slave to book sales as much as any other full-time writer. This is my job and I approach it as such.
Thanks to Nano, I got off to a roaring start. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one.
So here’s how the month is going to go. I will write installments daily or semi-daily, allowing for life and all that, to complete my first non-fiction book, “NaNoWriMo: A Passion, A Vision, A Cautionary Tale,” where I will share what I’ve learned over the years on how to take an idea to a completed project. I will give you a starting time, an ending time, my word count, etc, so you can see the nuts and bolts it takes to complete a project.
To honor my first Nano, I’ll be doing it right here in the blog, right before your very eyes. I ain’t scared.
This is a first draft, so it will not be fastidiously edited. This book will emphasize progress over perfection. You will have time to bathe and dress your baby for the world to see. But Nano is almost exactly like giving birth. Your “baby” will come out all covered with goo, not yet ready for the world yet, and that’s okay. In fact that’s necessary.
It’s also a topic for another day.
Normally I go into Nano with an outline, with a lot of my prep work already done. I find this the most expedient way to get from point A to point B, but unfortunately, thanks once again to life, I was unable to do a lot of that beforehand. We’ll get into that later, too.
Right now, I’m just diving right in because I can’t imagine a November without Nanowrimo. Once you start, you can’t stop, especially if you’re obsessive-compulsive like me and like to check things off in the “completed” column. This year we’re going to do that together, one little ol’ word at a time.
Welcome to the mad house.
Welcome to November 1.
This is Nanowrimo.
Started: November 1, 2015 11:30am PST
Completed: November 1, 2015 12:19pm PST
Word Count: 1,762
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