Each November, writers all over the world participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel-Writing Month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words on a novel in thirty days. A huge community forms around this shared goal every year, with aspiring authors supporting each other, providing motivation and reference resources and writing tips.
But there’s a problem with it: 50,000 words is a good challenge for a month’s worth of writing, but 50,000 words doesn’t a novel make. Not in the current adult fiction market as it stands, anyway. It’s a good start, but it’s not the whole thing. Especially not if you’re writing only with an eye to word count, which probably means a there’s a significant amount of padding going on. (Expect a post here about padding your word count closer to November 1.)
Pushing out 50,000 words in a month leaves many participants facing December with exhaustion, strained eyesight and fingers, a project that isn’t finished, and little motivation to keep going. Often, there’s no desire to even look at the work-in-progress again for a good long time. There’s a reason why National Novel Editing Month doesn’t come around until the following March.
Writer J.M. Frey (whose forthcoming novel Triptych is one of my current projects!) has suggested a strategy to give NaNoWriMo some closure. She’s proclaimed September 1st to be the start of NaNoWriMo Warm-Up. Her premise: writing 30,000 words over the two-month span of September and October will get writers in the groove for November, and will give them the opportunity to end up with an 80,000-word novel (a respectable length for a completed first draft) when all is said and done.
I think it’s an ambitious idea, but I also think that anyone who aspires to be a professional writer needs to develop the discipline to keep up a brisk writing pace for more than a single month, and needs to prioritize having a completed project above reaching an arbitrary word count. This could be a good exercise toward developing that discipline, and it’s an interesting add-on to the NaNoWriMo concept.
See the link above for more information, and let me know how it goes if you decide to participate!
{ 1 comment }
I like the idea of a warm-up for NaNoWriMo, and the fact it will help to get the work to novel length. That said, my life is so busy with work, school, and family that NaNo is out of reach. I need more hours in a day.
That doesn’t mean I don’t write. When I’m not being a bad boy, I set a low writing goal of 500 words a day and I usually meet that goal. In fact, most days I make it to a thousand. Setting the bar low, at least for me, doesn’t leave me with the sense of failure I get when I set the bar higher and fail, even if the wordcount is the same.
In the end, we all just have to figure out what works to get us in the chair and writing. Many roads that lead to the same place. We won’t mention what the road is paved with. ;)
Comments on this entry are closed.