Last month I embarked on NaNoWriMo, the yearly National Novel Writing Month. It was a bit of a spur of the moment decision, I had thought about doing it for a couple of years now but never really thought I would be able to do it. The target is to write 50,000 words in one month which means averaging 1667 words per day for 30 days.
The beginning of November got closer and I still hadn’t signed up, didn’t have a clue what to write about beyond a sketchy first line and no confidence that I would even make 5000 words (which is the longest piece I have written previously). I signed up on Saturday the 30th of October after some external events conspired induced the need to fill up some time and mental capacity. The following night I was poised, waiting for midnight to tick by and allow me to join in the initial word sprint to get the ball rolling.
The sketchy initial sentence flowed on to the screen in front of me, followed by another one and another. By the time I had reached the end of 20 minutes I had written a touch over 500 words with out really thinking about what I was writing. It might all be complete nonsense for all I know, I haven’t even gone back and read anything I wrote yet and don’t plan to until January. That’s not the point of NaNoWriMo though, the point is to just write and get the whole story on the page in one pass as best you can. Don’t edit, don’t censor just write. So that’s what I did for the next few weeks.
I averaged over 2000 words a night in the end and reached in excess of 50,000 words on the 22nd of November. I decided to wrap the story up at that point even though deep down I felt that the thing had reached a pre-mature end in a contrived manner. I resolved to fix these things later when I make some time to edit and polish my masterpiece. The satisfaction of having completed such a task was immense, even accepting that the first draft was probably going to be dire and need almost completely re-writing. The point was that the first draft of something that had been bubbling away under the surface of my mind was out there now and could be edited polished and might end up being read by someone else.
This leads me on to the three important things that I think I have learnt from doing NaNoWriMo this year.
- Just write, it gets the ideas out of your head and then you can sort the rest out later. Trying to write while editing yourself and going back and tweaking sentences becomes very hard work after a very short time. In my case it has lead to some very tortured and impenetrable texts which then don’t lend themselves to being edited or fixed.
- There is a lot of stuff in my head that I wasn’t really aware of from a creative viewpoint. Having no idea of a plot up front and just writing and seeing where the story went was exhilarating, new twists and turns emerged, characters resisted being pushed in directions that they didn’t want to go in, it was like I was just writing what I was seeing played out before me and some times I struggled to keep pace with the action.
- You don’t need a lot of time to actually write if you can get something to motivate you. Previously I had tried to set aside chunks of time to write, half days where I could be alone with some nice music and write. Not easy with a full time job, two kids and everything else going on. With NaNo I fitted 500 words in here and there, over lunch breaks, while dinner was cooking, any time I could. I was surprised at how easily I could get the thread of what I was doing and then write the next little bit. I had longer chunks in the evening for about an hour where I just stopped watching the usual stream of Family Guy repeats and wrote instead. There’s no such thing as not having the time to write we just normally fill it up with other things which are less rewarding.
I am still trying to work out what I will do with my novel now I have written it but that’s a decision I will sort out after all this Christmas stuff is dealt with. I am not sure if I will do NaNo again next year. I feel like all the ideas have been drained out of my head now and I won’t be able to do it again but I might feel differently as the end of October 2011 rolls round.
