Your Thoughts On NaNoWriMo?

[dr_pretentious]

I'm working on another chunky essay on teaching and fantasy literature for the Black Gate blog. This one's about the hazards and blessings of National Novel Writing Month, an international phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of people try to write rough drafts of novels in a frenzy of indiscriminate production, start to finish, during the thirty days of November.

Some sizable number of this blog's readers have tried NaNoWriMo at least once. Some of you are even here because we met, virtually or in person, through sharing the NaNoWriMo ordeal. It's an exhilarating and somewhat insane thing to try. I have powerfully mixed feelings about it, and about whether I'd have a third go at it after my kids are older. (Yes, some people try to write 50,000 words in 30 days while raising young children. I can't imagine trying that. I think for most humans it just wouldn't be a kid-compatible process.)

Anyhow, if you're willing to risk being quoted in my blog post, please feel free to comment here or in email about your NaNoWriMo experiences, or lack thereof if you've considered it but never taken the plunge. Come to think of it, some of you have been innocent bystanders watching the spectacle of other people's NaNoWriMo chaos, and you may have things to say, too.

Comments

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I think whether or not NaNo is valuable to a writer depends on the writer himself/herself. The level of a writer has a lot to do with that, I think.

For newer writers, if they think they're going to write 50,000 words and sell the novel, I'd say it's bad.

For newer writers that are participating to learn, I think it's awesome.

The more we write, the more we learn.

I've learned a lot from NaNo. I've learned to write daily. To write fast so the doubts don't catch up to me. I've learned to write a draft in one month that can actually be edited into a novel and doesn't have to be scrapped.

I think NaNo could be a powerful teaching tool, but, sadly, there's not a lot of instrution that actually goes along with it.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The first year I did Nano, I recall you beat 100,000 words in that month, and you had plenty of other stuff going on in your life. Blew my mind to watch your word count tallies.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, there are the various free to download workbooks and faqs and the pages devoted to explaining what NaNo is and how to get the best out of it, the pep talks archive, the blog which addresses loads of issues, the twitter feed, the book... It's constantly reiterated that this is about getting your story sorted out and getting you revved up, rather than writing a polished saleable novel in one month.

And that did NOT stop me from analysis paralysis when I first gave it a go! The impossible standards were all in my head, and persisted despite all the many indicators plastered across the site, and all the people on forums reinforcing the fact that focusing on Getting It Right Right Now is not helpful. Or even relatively sane.

The other years I tried, I got flu (twice) and took weeks to recover, and broke my right arm and shattered my wrist. Oops.

This year, I'm a Rebel. I'll be putting together something factual, I will be using NaNo to teach me writing as a daily discipline, I will not be looking for anything more polished than quick sentences and bullet points and basic ideas, and I will be focused on brain-dumping rather than coming up with a narrative flow. Just words on the page. Aim low, I reckon :D

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Writing daily is the most important thing, I think, for most kinds of writers and most kinds of projects. Nanowrimo is good for breaking some kinds of blockages, but to the extent that you do it in the classically frenzied mode it's not the best way to learn a daily discipline, because that frenzy is unsustainable--intentionally unsustainable. Doing it the way you plan to, as a capital-R Rebel, could get you what you're looking for.

I am a big fan of bullet points. And I think I wrote tens of thousands of words of lists, notes, bullet points, and diagrams for months before I wrote the first actual scene of the Big Book (thank goodness I didn't try to do that one as a Nanowrimo project).

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

I have finished NaNo 6 times. The writing of 50,000 words in 30 days is not that hard because part of the whole point of NaNoWriMo is, of course, that it can stink. December is for editing.

I did not know about NaNo when I was teaching, but I can't see that it would have done much for the particular students I had, who considered it somewhere between cruel and unusual punishment and some kind of hysterical joke if I asked them to write 50 words, and who felt that every word they did put on paper was honey from the tongue of Zeus (or some other, more appropriate deity - I don't know which one, offhand, but most of them didn't even know Zeus so I was still ahead...)and were insulted that I thought anything should ever be changed, NaNo would not be much use.

All practice does help. I can't say that any of my NaNovels are yet readable, but then, I have not edited any of them and I do not expect them to be. Writing them serves my own particular purpose. They do get closer to being something worth editing every year, but that might be by accident...

I have always thought NaNo was a lot like RAGBRAI, without the humidity. RAGBRAI is an organized, extended bike ride through Iowa in the middle of summer. I believe it has been described as being rolled up in a rug and thrown down a flight of stairs... Anyway, there is that same element of an average person doing something normally only done by the above average/moderately to severely insane and surviving it contributing to the satisfaction of the endeavor.

I suspect that those most capable of or skilled in the writing of actually publishable novels are probably least in need of and least intrigued by the thought of dashing off a rough draft in a month. And if one's writing style is not to draft atrociously and then repair, but to write from a carefully prepared outline and revise as one goes, I see no reason why NaNo would work at all.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Can you tell me more about RAGBRAI? I'm intrigued.

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

Ah, RAGBRAI. It is probably Google-able, but you may need to drop the RA. The original ride was sponsored by a newspaper that had those initials, and I think it may not be anymore.

Someone, probably 30 odd years ago, got this idea that it would be great to have people ride bikes across Iowa. Marathon running was very popular at the time, and triathlons were just getting started, so the idea of pushing yourself physically in a more or less non-competitive way was probably in the air. (Serious athletes are very serious about thons of all description, but an awful lot of people who run these have no illusions whatsoever that they will win, place, show, or even limp across the finish line, which is why I say more or less non-competitive. They are all person vs self conflicts for most participants.)

So they made the ride happen. (Obviously, this is the very short form of the story, but I am working from memory here and I'd rather be brief than wrong.) As it stood back then, a different route was planned every year, and eventually, if not the first time, towns actually worked at getting on the route, because it brought in lots of business. Most places the ride went through couldn't possibly fit all the riders in available hotel rooms, so people rented out rooms and churches held dinners and rented floor space for sleeping bags and it must have been something like ten days in a college dorm except that most people were awake most of the day and something actually got done. The people who did it were not necessarily normally distance bike riders, and it seemed to me a collectively fun thing that, if not overtly "Good" in some way was at least harmless. For some reason, as I write this it is striking me as a 70's version of a flash mob, except interminably longer. (In this I may be completely wrong.)

If it is still going on I am sure it has changed in some ways, but this description was what I was thinking of when I mentioned it. It was a challenge that could stretch you, but which, if you failed, was highly unlikely to actually hurt you. It was physically grueling, it involved meeting new people, it seemed like fun. I think NaNo is like that. But I must say that while I have never fallen off my desk chair during NaNo, I am ALWAYS in danger of falling off any bike I get near. For me, this was the better choice, but I still think the ride is interesting.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

a 70's version of a flash mob, except interminably longer

The 70's would have been much cooler or much more appalling with flash mobs. Or perhaps both.

Now I'm trying to imagine various other decades with flash mobs. The 1920s ones would have been flash speakeasies. Martin Luther King, Jr. with access to flash mobs would have been even more formidable, but then so would the Klan have been. I'm really enjoying the 1770s and 1780s as flash mob decades. Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin would have been so there.

If I grooved on writing alternate history or the New Weird, I'd rush out to turn this into a story. It's the kind of thing I'd enjoy reading, but not writing.

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

*mental image of Ben Franklin doing the "Hammertime" routine...*

Thank you. I really needed a smile this morning...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I think all your students must have ended up in my freshman composition courses at Rutgers. Well I remember coming up against those same attitudes.

Being rolled up in a rug and thrown down a flight of stairs is actually pretty close to my description of watching that Oscar-bait film 21 Grams. Only I think it was getting stuffed into a burlap sack and whacked with hammers. Man, I wish I had biked across Iowa rather than watched that movie.

And...six times? That's impressive. Does it get easier? I found that my second attempt was not actually any easier than the first.

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

Does it get easier? Good question.

My first NaNo was for my son, so you can't go by that. I have done any number of things for that child which I normally couldn't or wouldn't do. But also, I had pretty realistic expectations. I wasn't expecting to write anything great, I was relying on someone else's plot structure for part of it, and most of the characters were family members, so I didn't have to think about what they were like, I just had to describe them.

The second wasn't easier, but I don't know that it was that much harder.

Somewhere along the line it got habituated in me. At this point I sort of NaNo by accident from time to time. July of 2010 I was attacked by 40,000 words of a story. Between November of last year and March of this year I did at least 270,000 words. If I am at a sticky bit, I just go past it and figure I can come back and fill it in later. If I am writing and I suddenly realize the last 100,000 words all need to be thrown out, it doesn't really bother me.

I sort of think I am not a real writer, not because I haven't gotten anything published (it is a given that if you never edit anything and never send it out you will never be published, at least in your own lifetime) but because my reasons for writing and my feelings about my writing seem so different from everyone else's. I do not have a story that needs to be told. I do not write because I have to create. I have no illusions that anyone is burning to read any prose of mine, and none that I am an unappreciated genius or even a potential commercial best seller. I don't much think of myself as anything. I suspect that makes it easier.

Really, NaNo is about just doing it - not doing it right, not doing it well, not doing it with style, just doing it. The target audience is the people who are always saying they are going to write a book - some day. If you go in with that as a goal, it's grueling, but only in a fun sort of way...

And I had no idea that Rutgers had a combined program in Pediatric Medicine and owning a chain of nail salons, which was the most common career path plan expressed by my students! It was not one or the other, they planned to do both. Nice kids, not hampered by too oppressive a sense of reality.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

One of my local Nanowrimo buddies made a conscious decision to write therapeutically. Her mother had died that year, and she wanted to write something for the sole purpose of processing that experience. For her, it was immensely healing. She was, and is, a happy non-writer. I don't know if she got more fun out of the process than I did trying to use Nanowrimo to produce the first draft of an eventually salable novel, but she certainly had less stress.

Your students' career aspirations are an odd combination. Was it really common to want to do both? Rutgers produces a surprising number of pharmacists, and a surprising number of failed aspiring pharmacists.

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

"Your students' career aspirations are an odd combination. Was it really common to want to do both? Rutgers produces a surprising number of pharmacists, and a surprising number of failed aspiring pharmacists."

I never did a statistical study of any kind, even informally, but the first time I got this combination from a student I was naturally rather, erm, surprised, and I noticed in particular that it came up again at least several times. Career aspirations among my students were rarely terribly realistic. I understand the ones who wanted to own hair or nail salons, because they frequented these places, usually liked doing their friend's hair or nails, and it was familiar. I also thought it was not a bad idea. The students who expressed a desire to be a pediatrician had no idea what it took to become one. I was told by other teachers that it was a common career goal to want to be one, and I assume it also had something to do with this being familiar. Not everyone who wanted to do one or the other wanted to do both, but yes, it was indeed at least more common than I would have suspected to want to do both. It sort of made my eyes cross every time I heard it.

(I am sure some of my students could have, with the proper support, become doctors, but I doubt many did. The obstacles to getting through college and into med school to someone who had trouble negotiating the HS system would require not only heroic effort, but a series of fortuitous coincidences that can happen, but cannot be counted upon to happen.)

Most of my students never expressed any sort of career goal to me. I spent the last dozen or more years of my career teaching students who were in my classroom because they had failed English in Day School, most often because of truancy. I had no time outside of the allotted class time in which I could meet with them or help them, and it was night school, so I would not even run into them in the hall or lunchroom - they came, they sat, they went. Many of them were very quiet in my class and didn't say much and I am sure quite a few of them managed well for themselves - recently a woman at my bank branch was extremely happy when she found out I was the same MissX who taught her in night school - that was a very gratifying experience. However, I am, sadly, quite certain that if I had a list of their SS numbers, which I don't, and I went through a list of guests at the local jail for the last 15 years that there would be a certain overlap. Many of them had problems which had nothing to do with English literature and which needed help that night classes alone could not provide. There are very few good options these days for a person who can't get themselves through HS, at least, and if one starts to take into account the many reasons why these kids didn't necessarily get a diploma, the vision only becomes sadder. I wish I knew how many had managed to do ok. No matter how long I went on, an LJ post couldn't possibly contain all the things I have to say about the whole situation.

Pharmacy requires quite a bit of math and quite a bit of memorization, and a huge percentage of people who start the program not finishing it does not surprise me at all.

[peartreealley.livejournal.com]

I started NaNoWriMo in 2002, and participated until about 2008 when things changed for me writing-wise, and it was no longer right for my situation.

But during 2002-2008 it was life-changing--it's a great way, with support, to learn how to write every day, and to push past the "10 pages and abandoned it" tendencies that plague would-be writers. It happens during a traditionally busy month (at least for Americans), so it helps you learn how to keep writing despite distractions. It gets people writing who have had trouble doing it in the past, and I can't see how that's a terrible thing at all--no matter how the quality of the writing is or the topic.

There's more to NaNo than what it teaches you, though, and that's where one starts to learn quality and revision, assuming they go that far--many NaNo-ers are only novelists in November, and that's all they want to be.

Another aspect to NaNo that is under sung is the social arena. Despite being in Seattle, learning about the event through someone in New York, I eventually met all those I know and love because of that one event in 2002. I know two couples in the Seattle area who met at a NaNo write-in and are now happily married. I found the writing community that I learned those next steps from through NaNo. Other writers have--virtually or locally--managed to find other like-minded people, whether it's only for that November fling, or throughout the year. I think that social aspect has a lot to do with why people come back. It's a wild, "impossible" task to share with however many thousands are doing it this year.

In short, NaNo taught me these things:
1) Write consistently.
2) Push past the "10 pages and abandon" story starts.
3) (Most importantly:) Have fun and don't take yourself so damn seriously.

NaNoWriMo, though, is ultimately a training ground, and while the lessons learned there are crucial, it's certainly not all there is to novel-writing. Once I learned those lessons, I stopped doing NaNoWriMo, but I still cheer others on, and I still donate every year, because I know what it did for me, and I respect and treasure it.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind me commenting on your comment - it brought something to mind for me!

The "Have fun and don't take yourself so damn seriously" part is, I think, an important part of writing. I've been blocked for two years. I am blocked on one scene in one particular story. I can't write through it, I feel it would be wrong to write everything around it and just leave a placeholder there, and somehow I have got it in my head that I can't write anything else until I finish that. Perhaps this is a sign that I need to do NaNoWriMo again.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I know a woman who used to go beyond abandoning her projects after a few pages, and actually deleted them because it was so anxiety-inducing for a file that wasn't already perfect and finished to continue existing on her computer. Nanowrimo cured her of that. It can be strong medicine.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

The first time I did NaNoWriMo it was because I was writing a web page for a content site called "How To Succeed at NaNoWriMo." Part of what I had to do to write the page was to go through the sign-up process and take screen shots. The first day, I realized I was already signed up and thought, "What the hell?"

I was working insane hours and had a commute that was 2+ hours each way. Despite that, and despite the fact that the only thing I knew about my book going in was that my two characters were unconscious and tied to each other in a warehouse, I managed to successfully complete NaNoWriMo.

The thing that was most liberating about NaNoWriMo is that it was, in many ways, like Julia Cameron's "morning pages," only I had to write more. I actually found NaNoWriMo easier than morning pages.

My life situation is in some ways not much different right now and I'm considering doing it again, just because it would get me in a different frame of mind from my day job.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If you decide to do it again, I will be cheering you on all the way.

I googled Julia Cameron's morning pages. I tried to picture writing three pages first thing in the morning when the thing that wakes me up is the sound of my children demanding to be played with. And I can see a lot of reasons those three pages would be hard under lots of circumstances.

Nanowrimo is crazy, but it's a flexible sort of crazy.

[peartreealley.livejournal.com]

I cheat with my morning pages--do them in my first 10-15 minutes at work, rather than first thing when I wake up. Seems to work for me ^_^

[jaime-sama.livejournal.com]

Every year I get a little closer to doing NaNoWriMo. The first time I heard about it I thought "No way, those folks are NUTS." Then for a few years I thought, "Well, it sounds kind of fun in a crazy way." Then last year I thought "I might try it sometime." And when I read your post, I just went "Crap, it's November already? I'm not ready to commit yet" which seems to imply that I was considering committing to it. Can you consider something subconsciously?

Objectively speaking, I sure sound like a person who might be doing NaNoWriMo next year, don't I?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

You do. And you can totally consider things subconsciously. Subconscious consideration is really handy for writing stories, so that's a good sign in itself.

If you haven't read Chris Baty's Nanowrimo handbook No Plot? No Problem!, give that a try. It's an entertaining read, whether you write anything or not. A lot of public libraries are supporting their local Nanowrimo cultists, so after November's over your library may have several copies available to check out.

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

No need to wait till next year - it's only the first. Just go give it a stab!