To Nano or Not to

One mistake newbie writers make is assuming–which, remember, is always making an ass out of “u” and “me”–that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, or nanowrimo.org) is a great undertaking for everybody. I mean, writing a novel in a month is a win/win, right? The answer is, in my opinion, only if you’re having trouble stretching your novels past novella length (around 100 pages, or 20,000 to 50,000 words). This is my situation. (No, I’m not lazy; I’ve already written rough drafts of a lot of novels that have yet to be critiqued. Yes, it gets harder after a while, at least for me.)

 

First of all, you shouldn’t need National Novel Writing Month to get your butt in a chair. This should come with discipline, which at first does not come easy. After I read King’s On Writing, asking for four hours a day, I had to bribe myself by playing albums as I was working. Four hours a day–in a row–is hard on any ass.

 

Second, I’m not sure you’ll come up with a brilliant novel in one month. If you’re a better writer than me, you probably can, but I need at least a couple, if not three to six. It’s just not long enough to get a decent rough draft. To me, NaNo can seem like a race, and as usual, slow and steady wins it, in my opinion. At least slower than 100,000 words in a month (I type at about forty-five words a minute, but I strive for about 2,100 words a day). Keep in mind that NaNo awards are handed out on the twenty-fifth, giving you less than a month. That’s 52,500 words for me–if I’m at full-steam ahead every day, which I’m not–and I’ve heard that agents want very close to 80,000 words.

 

Great things can happen when you get butt in chair and pound it out–the novel I’m having critiqued started out with a vague idea and went full-fledged crazy on me, in a good way–but you’ll probably want to ask yourself which is better, hurrying to finish a draft, or taking your time and letting description flow. And I mean excellent, devil-detailed description like King, Koontz, and Ted Dekker.