I read and commented on the post Friendly Monsters: NaNoWriMo on WorldWeaverPress.com, written by guest blogger Kristina Wojtaszek. Kristina tells us that she didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo this year. I commented that I hadn’t either.
NaNoWriMo is shorthand for National Novel Writing Month. It could just as easily stand for National Nonsense Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 words in the 30 days that comprise November. It’s a challenge that’s been issued every year since it started in 1999. The official web site resides at http://nanowrimo.org/. The word count of 50,000 is slight for a novel, but many participants recognize they will still have work to do on their novels after NaNoWriMo ends.
Kristina said in her reply to my comment that she admires those writers who can crank out 50,000 or more words per month. I do too, more so if they are able to do it consistently, every month. Doing it for one month is cool, and I did it once, for one month, caught up in the excitement of it all. So I know I can do it. I also know I can’t do it every month. Therein lies the problem.
NaNoWriMo is to writing like purging is to losing weight. You might accomplish the short term goal, but the activity doesn’t give you good tools for accomplishing long term goals.
Just like people who are serious about losing weight and keeping it off, people who are serious about writing novels need to develop habits they can sustain throughout the year and for the rest of their lives. NaNoWriMo can be detrimental to those who can’t finish or can’t keep up the same pace after it’s over. They pour themselves into the writing for one month, and then they are burned out. In the year I won the NaNoWriMo challenge, when December 1 arrived I didn’t want to write another word. I wasn’t ready on December 2 or 7 or 20 either. Christmas and New Year’s Day came and went, and I still wasn’t ready to write again. I had the desire to write, but I didn’t want to be writing on any particular day. When I did start work on a story again, it wasn’t on a novel.
NaNoWriMo can get people energized and talking about writing. That’s a good thing. But it doesn’t teach good writing habits. A lot of people don’t have the luxury of devoting all their working hours to novel writing. I’m one of those people. I have a software engineering job on which I work 40 hours each week, and I write during non-business hours. A lot of other people are in the same boat. For many of us, churning out 50,000 words a month would involve much useless wordage, all for the sake of a word count. I’ll write plenty of throwaway text as is, and don’t like wasting time doing it on purpose.
What writers like me need is to develop writing habits that fit our lifestyles and help us achieve our yearly writing goals. Suppose you have a yearly goal of 100,000 words, realizing that you’ll be throwing away 20% of those words, ending up with 80,000 words fit to be published. That’s just under 275 words per day. That is a reachable goal for most aspiring writers. If that is not a reachable goal for you, then set a lower goal. Writing 100 words per day will allow you to have 100,000 words in just under 3 years. Go for it.
Some people who give advice for writers will suggest that you write every day. If you can do it, good for you. I can’t. I have to occasionally take a day or two off. I took the NaNoWriMo challenge twice and the first year I tried the NaNoWriMo challenge, I failed to write every day. When I got behind, I had to write even more words per day than 1667. Every missed day increased the amount by which I was behind, majorly discouraging me and making it even harder to catch up. I didn’t catch up, in fact, and failed to win the challenge that year. That failure left me feeling worse about writing than if I hadn’t participated at all.
Having a process that works over the long haul is what matters for a person serious about writing. Forming writing habits that fit your lifestyle and help you consistently reach your writing goals is key. NaNoWriMo doesn’t do that for me, and I don’t see how it can for most aspiring authors, the very people whom it targets. To me NaNoWriMo feels more like a distraction than a help, like playing a Facebook game competing with friends every day for a month. It can be a lot of fun, and it never hurts to socialize with friends, but the biggest thing you have to show for it at the end of the month may be your score.
One positive thing about NaNoWriMo is that people talk to each other about it and the writing process, and that’s cool. I’m not saying NaNoWriMo has no place in the writing community. Just don’t think of it as anything more than it is—a social event. If you are serious about writing novels, come up with a realistic writing goal that fits your lifestyle, and set out now to achieve it. NaNoWriMo is over, and if you participated but didn’t win the challenge, don’t let it discourage you. Figure out what writing habits will work for you and your lifestyle and allow you to reach your writing goals. Then seriously get to work writing that novel.
If you have any thoughts about the pros and cons of the social event that is NaNoWriMo, I’d love to hear them.
I don’t like Nanowrimo because I don’t like being told what to do. I like to form my thoughts out, put them in order, and correct them while I’m still thinking about the context I came up with them from.
Pick your appropriate relapse metaphor, but I don’t do nanowrimo, because I used to be able to write by the pound–and it turned out to be career suicide (i.e. paying fiction jobs cancelled) since the ability to meet deadlines superseded any concern I had for the quality of my work. After 10 years off from writing (during which I worked as a programmer, learning to pay attention to details), I returned. Now I’m too slow, but at least if I complete something, I know it might just be competent.