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It's the Most Lunatic Time of the Year

October 31, 2008 It's that time of year again.

Not the time of year when Americans show our gratitude by stuffing our faces with turkey and cranberry sauce -- well, that too.  The time of year when people not just in America but all over the world lock their doors and fend off family they don't really want to talk to anyway by saying, "Go away -- I have to write."

Starting tomorrow, it's the tenth annual National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org), wherein participants try to crank out a fifty-thousand word novel in the month of November.  It's a pretty big thing these days, with support groups and certificates for those who finish.

I'll admit it, though: I'm a NaNo grinch.  I'll grant that it can be fun, and even help certain kinds of writers.  But if your goal is to produce work you might have a chance of selling, then despite the hype, NaNo may not be for you.  Fortunately, if you find external motivation and accountability a useful thing, there are other options out there.

First, the good things about NaNoWriMo.  If your biggest obstacle is making yourself apply butt to chair and hands to keyboard, then fantastic: this may be perfect for you.  Having a clearly-defined goal and a social community to prod you toward it helps a lot of people get in the habit of writing daily, which is often a pretty big obstacle.  Doing NaNo can prove to you that yes, it is possible to find, or rather make, time in the day for writing.  Or if the problem is your internal editor, sitting there like a big ugly LOLcat saying "UR DOING IT WRONG," then NaNo can help you outrun it.  If you're going to get fifty thousand words in thirty days, you don't have time for subconscious naysaying.

But -- here's where the grinching starts -- NaNo has its problems.  To get 50K in the month, you have to average nearly 1700 words a day.  Now, I know a few people whose standard working pace is that high or higher . . . but I can only think of two or three, and all of them have a lot of experience with this.  Me, my daily minimum is a thousand words.  Fifteen hundred if things are cooking along, but I usually don't sustain that for more than maybe a week at a time.  And I know plenty of novelists who go much slower than that.  I used to try to write faster, but ended up just producing a bunch of crap.

And that can be the problem with turning off the internal editor: if you give yourself permission to write crap, then crap may very well be what you get.  That's fine if your problem is getting anything out -- you can always revise it later -- but if putting words on the page isn't a problem for you, then why shackle yourself to a pace that may well cut into your quality?

Plus, depending on your genre, a fifty-thousand word novel isn't going to do you much good.  In science fiction and fantasy, 80K is usually considered the minimum for a publishable book.  Romance run shorter, as does YA -- but even there, you may find yourself some distance below the word-count publishers are looking for.  So now you have to go back and expand, putting in all those things you skipped over because you were charging full-speed toward the finish line.

All of which boils down to this: if you follow the rules of NaNoWriMo and want to publish what results, you may find yourself with more work to do after the fact than if you had written at your own pace to begin with.  Which is why I've said to friends on several occasions that I think trying and failing at NaNo may be the best of all possible worlds: you get the motivation and the practice, and maybe 10K or 30K of a good start, that you can then keep working on until you have a finished book.

If you're looking for a similar project that isn't quite so insane, then I recommend the Livejournal community Novel in 90 (community.livejournal.com/novel_in_90), the brainchild of Elizabeth Bear and others.  I've never done NaNo, but I think I've signed up for two or three rounds of Ni90, when they happened to coincide with a novel I was working on anyway.  The idea there is to produce 750 words a day for 90 days, for a total of 67,500, which may or may not be a complete book, depending on genre and whether you had anything on the page before you signed up.  There are daily and weekly threads to report your progress, or submit yourself for mockery if you've fallen off the wagon.

I'd venture to say that Ni90 is much closer to the real-life experience of most working writers than NaNo is.  Not so much the mockery -- though I've been known to recruit friends for that, when I'm having trouble getting work done -- but the pace.  This is a marathon sport, not a sprinting one, and slow and steady wins the race.  That's the other thing that sometimes worries me about NaNo: the idea that someone who wants to be a novelist may try it, crash and burn, and conclude from their experience that they don't have what it takes to be a writer.  NaNo seems to be crazy-making, and noveling is a crazy enough business that it doesn't need stress added to it.

NaNo isn't for everyone, but that doesn't mean it's for no one -- a disclaimer I feel compelled to add, lest the rabid hordes of NaNo fans descend upon me, brandishing their battered keyboards like weapons.  If you just want to write a novel, or you need something to prod you out of inaction or past the voice of your self-doubt, or if trying (whether or not you succeed) gets you on a roll you can continue even when the month is over, then knock yourself out.  I'm certainly not going to tell anyone not to do something that's good for them.  But if you're seeking publication, and/or the thought of matching that pace intimidates you more than it helps, then I suggest trying a saner approach.

You can still lock the door and tell your relatives to go away -- you have to write.

Posted by Marie Brennan on October 31, 2008 | Comments (4)