I am not officially participating in National Novel Writing Month this November. I’m not registering an account on their website, and while I have my own word count app to keep track of my projects (Writeometer, available on Google Play, if you’re curious), I’m not going to be publicly logging that word count every single day. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain … the little green one, over there, holding the mind control device. Ahem. That is to say, I don’t think any of you are interested in hearing me whine about how difficult it was to put fingers to keyboard on a Thursday evening, and mentioning plot points is kind of a spoiler even if it is for a first draft and therefore in flux. And while other people find it helpful to commiserate with a large online community, I’d much prefer to pester a handful of close friends. What else are Skype and Google Hangouts for?
But I am going to be writing a novel this month. And I am aiming for a minimum of 55 thousand words in the first draft. And, because public accountability seems to be the thing that kicks my butt into gear, I’ll be posting my weekly word count on Sundays until I finish the draft. (At which point you can bet there will be much throwing of confetti, even if I don’t do it on my blog where you can see it. As a relative novice I do still get excited every time I finish a manuscript. But that’s a post for another day.)
National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) posits that you can sit down for an hour or so and write about 1400 words in a day, every day, for thirty days, to produce fifty thousand words. To longtime veterans, this is half or one third of a novel. (Or one sixth, if you’re George R. R. Martin.) To newbies who’ve never written anything longer than 3k for a college essay, it’s Mount Everest. Perspective is one hell of a drug, as they say. Either way, the program encourages its participants to sit down and write a given amount of words, every day, for the month of November.
It’s an exercise in discipline rather than creativity, and if you’re looking to get into the business of writing, it’s good practice. Because the point of it is that the draft isn’t supposed to be perfect, it’s just supposed to be finished. That’s what a separate editing stage is for. And even if the drat you produce ends up a steaming pile of crap no matter how much you edit, who cares? You still produced something, and that 50k of crap got you 50k closer to something worth reading.