NaNoWriMo Thoughts - 2/3 Done
So, I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, which is part of the reason why I’ve not updated this page, nor recorded any podcast episodes, nor participated in any of the online stuff I was participating in prior to November. Another reason is that my computer’s hard drive died completely, and I’ve been sharing a computer with my wife. Oh, and my sister-in-law had her baby at the end of October, so nephew visiting has been going on. And work. And…. anyway!
In October, a number of people expressed their… objections to NaNoWriMo. They made a few valid points that I’m seeing in action right now. 50,000 words isn’t really a novel. The NaNo peeps focus far too much on reaching that 50,000 word goal. They also ask for a lot of money. I concede all these points, however, I still think NaNoWriMo is a good thing, so long as you keep a few things in mind.
I don’t know why, but so many people seem to think that writing is full of hard and fast rules and everything is set in stone. It’s not. It’s really not. Every single grammar rule can be broken. You should know what rules you’re breaking, so you know why it works to break them, and why it doesn’t, but the beautiful thing about writing, for me anyway, is that you get make it up as you go along. If you’re writing under a newspaper deadline, for a technical job, something like that, then sure, you may have strict rules you have to follow, but I hear far too many amateur fiction writers talk as though they’re up against a wall.
One major example of this issue is outlines. I’ve heard a lot of discussion about outlines and whether they work and whether they’re too confining. The major arguments I’ve heard against outlines are that they ruin the organic nature of a piece, that once you have an outline, you’re stuck, you can’t change anything, because it’s not in the outline. Hu-wha?! It’s just an outline! No one is sitting behind you making sure your characters don’t deviate from the path you’ve laid before them. If you’re characters go left instead of right, and it really bugs you that the outline says they should go right, change the outline!
This same principle applies to NaNoWriMo, I think. I’m not going to make it to 50,000 words, I know that I’m not. There are eleven days left and I just broke 16,000. Do I feel like a failure? Hell no! I have never written so many words devoted to one story before. More than that, I’ve added to this story almost every day. I’ve written just about every day this month. That’s huge for me. (The days I didn’t write, I was playing uncle to a newborn, so I’m okay with that. And even though I didn’t write, I regretted it. That’s a new thing.) Plus, I intend to keep going. I don’t know how long this story will be, but I’m going to finish it, somehow, somewhen.
I’m not going to hit 50,000, but I think that if I make it to November 30th, with 30,000 words, I’m going to call that a win. I’ll have written the equivalent of 1,000 words a day on a single story. I follow a lot of authors on Twitter, so theirs is an example I’d like to emulate, and that seems to be the average word count I see from them. They have jobs and families and lives and published books, so I figure it’s not a bad course to set for me, as well.
Is calling 30,000 words a NaNo win cheating? Sure it is. But so is copy-pasting the lyrics to “American Pie” into your story three or four times, and that’s a recommended practice from the NaNo staff. If I hit that 30,000, then I’ll know that every word I wrote is a word I intended to be written. I didn’t go off on wild tangents or include pornographic sex scenes simply as a trick for boosting my word count. That’s not to say I won’t go off on wild tangents (extremely probable) or include pornographic sex scenes (not so probable), but if I do, they’ll be there because I want them to be there. If I pad out my prose with random crap simply to boost my count… well, I see no difference.
So, if anyone asks in December if I made my 50K, I’ll be honest and say no. But I still won NaNo. I wrote every day. I wrote a massive amount of words (for me). I connected with local writers. I connected with writers online. I built up a real desire to write every day. I got everything out of NaNoWriMo that I wanted to get out of it. Who cares what anyone else wanted me to get out of it? Just like grammar; I learned the rules of NaNoWriMo, and then I broke ‘em.
