NaNoWriMo

10.15.07

Countdown: 18 days.  As in, “How long until that challenge-thingy you signed up for starts?”  18 days.  As in, “How long before you can start writing that novel?”  18 days. 

 

I mentioned in a September column that I planned to challenge myself and sign up for  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writers Month). Well I’m all signed up and ready to go.  Thank goodness I have a column and can write something, because plot and character development have been spinning ‘round my brain for so long now that NOT writing it all down is excruciating.  Nobody mentioned what an exercise in self-control this is.  Or maybe they did and I didn’t pay attention.

 

So here I am calling on anyone who’s ever said, “I should write a novel.”  Now’s your big chance!  Signing up is easy – just log onto nanowrimo.org and click the button that says “sign up.”  You create a profile that mostly consists of a large empty progress bar that measures word count.  Then you can browse forums on the site, add writing buddies to your profile, and even (so they say) find regional and local people who will be working on the same challenge.

 

In these last weeks until November 1st you can daydream and brainstorm about plot and character and motivation.  Do some research, post messages in the forums, and mostly get yourself psyched up and excited to write. 

 

I already warned my husband that there would be no cooking or cleaning in the month of November.  He raised an eyebrow at me and said, “So what else is new?”  I would take offense at that reaction, only then I’d have to cook and clean to make the point that I am perfectly capable of cooking and cleaning, and that seems like a trap I don’t want to get caught in, so I’m going to let it slide.  Which, I think, might have been his point.  But whatever.

 

Lookie there!  The above paragraph contains 89 words.  A word count of 50,000 is all you need to “win” NaNoWriMo.  50,000 words is about 200 double-spaced word processor pages.  Heck, that’s no problem.  My 2nd novel was 90,000 words, and that one only took me a year an a half to complete.  Fifty thousand in a month shouldn’t be awful.  1666 words a day.  I usually try to get 800 words into a column, which takes me about an hour, so double that daily – it’s do-able.  Heck, break it down like that and it’s not even all that scary.

 

Hmm, let me think what else you need to know to join NaNo.  It’s free, but participants are welcome to donate money to help cover administrative costs.  You’re supposed to write a fictional story of 50,000 words or more from scratch.  No bringing an already-started, stalled, or half-completed project to NaNo.  Some of the beauty of the contest is that it encourages free writing and discourages editing.  Pound out the words.  Put some flesh on an idea that until now has only been a skeleton.  Fiction, fiction, fiction!  No biographies,  autobiographies or memoirs –  unless it’s a biography of your fictional character.  Any genre – literary, historical, mystery, mainstream, young adult.  Heck, a whole bunch of people out there don’t even know yet what genre they’re writing, and probably won’t know until they find out what kind of trouble their main characters get into.

 

I discovered all kinds of things I didn’t know when I wrote my first novel.  I was charmed and amazed that once the story gained momentum I, personally, had very little control over what happened.  Story logic picks up a flow of its own once you’ve created people who live and breathe on the page.  Give them passion, intensity, and motivation, and it can be difficult to micro-manage the story process from intolerable problem at point A to happily ever after solution at point B.  There are times you need to brainstorm what’s going to happen next, but writing feels phenomenal when characters do and say things the writer never expected, but it’s right and true even if it changes the direction of the whole blessed story.

 

I’m going to write about a girl who’s hired as a bounty hunter to  – ahh, well, never mind.  There are 18 days left before even I will begin to find out if thegirl has a screw loose or what.  Inthe meantime I’m going to keep all this story pressure building up inside in hopes that it’ll flow out effortlessly come November 1st.   

 

Sometimes the only way it’s going to get done is to just sit down and do it.

 

NaNoWriMo.org.   Or nanowrimo.org.  Caps or no caps, either way is fine.  Now come  join me and write a novel in November.