The NaNoWriMo Ship has Set Sail!

Hello, hello, oh readers of mine! And how are you all today? Good, I hope. I'm getting ready to put in my day's worth of words for NaNoWriMo. 

For those of you who don't know, November is National Novel Writing Month (thus the abbreviation) in which people are challenged to write a 50,000 words novel (about 220 pages) in the month of November. That's thirty days at about 1,667 words a day. A challenge, certainly, but not impossible.

I started NNWM a few years back, when I was still in school at the University of Georgia. I knew I wanted to be a writer by that point, and I'd even heard about NNWM in one of my creative writing classes the year before I started, but wasn't sure it was for me. I mean, 50,000 words in only 30 days? It seemed impossible.

I'd written but a few stories up to that point, and my only novel took a good fifteen months to get down on the page. Doing all that work in one month seemed the height of madness. But, as some feats are apt to happen, my girlfriend of the time broke up with me in early October of that year, leaving me with much more time on my hands than I'd had lately. Suddenly, NNWM seemed possible. 

So I found a friend who was interested in doing it too, found a kickoff party that doubled as a Halloween gathering, brought a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and got to writing. I don't remember how many words I got down before we all started asking each other about our stories, but I remember it was more than almost everyone at the party combined.

Before that, I didn't think of myself as a very fast writer. After all, fifteen months. But at that moment, when people were saying they'd gotten a few hundred words down, and I'd already passed 2K, I felt good.

I know that quantity isn't the same as quality, and I bet at least one person's hundred words was better than my thousands, but it's a first draft. There will be time for "a hundred visions and revisions" later. First, the words have to get out on the page. And I am good at that. Why not be proud of what you're good at?

I ended up writing five thousand words by the time we called it quits for the night, and since I had that day off of work, I went home, slept, and went to Starbucks that afternoon, where I wrote another 5K. And that day is still my all-time record. Ten thousand words in twenty-four hours, a bit more than 30 pages.

I didn't break my record this year, getting in a little bit more than 3K, but I've been keeping up a fairly steady level of output, which makes me happy. I do so enjoy this time of year, when I don't have to care about what my final product will look like, if what I'm writing makes sense, if whatever my characters are doing fits with what I just had them talking about.

NaNoWriMo is my chance to just write for fun. Writers put so much effort into making our stories look effortless (and believe me, they are not), as though they just flowed out of our head and onto the page. And that work can be tiresome, even dreadfully boring. I don't particularly like editing, personally. But during NaNoWriMo, I lock up my Internal Editor and hide the key until December. Right now, all I need to worry about is filling up my word-count meter.

And I'm off!