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!


