NaNoWriMo

I’m going to write a novel.  I promise not to say: “What a novel idea.”

A few days ago, friends told me about an organization that sponsors National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short.  I suggest you browse their website (NaNoWriMo Homepage) to learn more about the group, but I’ll give you a quick low-down.  In 1999, a small group of students, and aspiring writers in the San Francisco area came up with the crazy idea of writing a 50,000 word novel in one month.  The point was not (and still isn’t)  to produce a polished, finished product or even do any editing at all.  The point is writing a novel.  Just write it.  As they say on the site, it’s all about quantity, not quality.  The larger point is not to worry about perfection, but just to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and give yourself permission to write.

I was intrigued.  At first I thought how could I possibly do that with a day job, and then I did some advanced math, spent time crunching numbers and running some pretty intense equations, and realized that to come up with 50,000 words in 30 days, I only need to write 1666 or 7  a day.  Honestly, I can write a 600 word rough draft of an essay during the 20 minute bus ride from home to where I get off the bus.  If I have some sort of outline or rough sense of where I’m going, I can write 600 words pretty quickly.  My shorter posts are around 400 words and the longer ones , 900.  Letters from Jerusalem and Bombay tend to run 1100 to 1200.  Words aren’t usually a problem for a word slinger like me.  The difference between the time I spend on this blog and writing a novel for the NaNoWriMo event is I won’t edit the 50,000n words.  The organizers are very specific about that.  Those 600 words I write in 20 minutes on the bus, take two hours or more to make ready for the blog.  Some posts I start, edit, and let sit for a few days, weeks or even months before publishing.  To make it to 1666 per day, I can only draft.  No perfecting allowed.  I minimally edited (though more than I will edit the novel next month) this post as an example of what it looks and feels like.  (Though this sentence I am writing 18 hours after wrote this, in the process of editing.  Since this isn’t NaNoWriMo yet, there’s no reason not to smooth this out a bit.)

NaNoWriMo in many ways is a movement after my own heart.  Many of the things they do, I also do and believe.  For example, the introductory email they sent after I registered included the following:

Tell everyone you know that you’re writing a novel in November. This will pay big dividends in Week Two, when the only thing keeping you from quitting is the fear of looking pathetic in front of all the people who’ve had to hear about your novel for the past month. Seriously. Email them now about your awesome new book. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse.

When I first started writing regularly, starting with a Daily Sentence and the first Life Literary, I told my wife, our children and their spouses, and a handful of nephews.  I wanted at least a little accountability, some sort of public statement to keep me on track.  I know I’m gonna need that to write this novel.

Another idea is the value of subdividing a large task.  I haven’t written a book yet, but I have written essays, paragraphs, and sentences in this blog that I intend to combine into a book or three, one called Garden: a Love Story, a couple collections of letters from abroad, and, I hope, a book full of ideas for living a literary life.  50,000 words sounds impossible and crazy to attempt, but 1667 per day, I think I can handle.

Finally, this exercise gives writers the opportunity to give themselves permission.  Writing in this blog not quite daily but almost for the past nine months is a way I’ve given myself permission to write what I wanted to write.  I don’t think much (well, I do, but I don’t usually let it stop me) about writing what I imagine will sell or be successful.  I just write what I want to write, what the voice, my muse, is speaking.  With this blog I give myself permission to write and I am learning to trust my ear, my sense of what sounds good and how I want to say a particular thing.  I have been starting to think a little about fiction, but haven’t taken the plunge, thinking I wasn’t ready yet, or something ridiculous like that (I want to be an essayist.  I don’t do fiction.  Oh brother!)  NaNoWriMo gives me permission to write a story, a novel, and not care about anything but getting to 50,000 words.  Will parts, maybe big parts, be lousy and boring?  Yes, most likely.  Will the book end up being the basis of something I can edit into something not lousy and boring.  Very possibly, but really, none of this matters.  What matters is just the writing.

This event will happen in November.  Starting November 1, I will only be writing a novel.  What about this blog?  I don’t want to post nothing for a month so I intend to post some or maybe all of what I write for this novel.  I’m not sure whether to apologize for that and say bear with me until December 1, or whether to say maybe you’re in for a treat.  Dickens serialized his novels, publishing a chapter at a time.  New Yorkers would row out to meet boats sailing in from England to get the next chapter of whatever Dickens was working on at the moment.  I don’t expect my first foray into fiction to generate that sort of excitement.  Like Dickens, however, I will be publishing a portion a day, some or maybe much of which (I haven’t decided yet) will become blog posts for November.  If you were waiting for some dreamy, beautifully crafted, exquisite essay about Thanksgiving, well, you’ll have to wait for next year.  Except maybe I’ll participate in NaNoWriMo again, so, hmm, maybe I should write the come ye thankful people come bit in October or maybe early December.

Setting out to write a novel in 30 days is an appropriate way for me to live literarily.  It fits my inclination and lifestyle.  I want to do it.  Part of the sermon I’ve been preaching on these pages since last December is how life, how living itself, can be and is ennobled by adding words, reading, yes, of course, but also, and maybe especially, writing.  I am doing that for myself with this blog and now, with NaNoWriMo.  Click on the tab, above, called Adding Words to Life for ideas of ways, most simpler than writing a 50,000 word novel, for how to add words to your life.  Or click on the NaNoWriMo link and sign up and join me and a few hundred thousand other word slingers.

By the way, this post is ending up with almost 1250 words and it took a little over an hour to write.  I did a little editing and re-writing but not much.  Wanted to practice for November.  The rest of October, I’ll be doing the usual amount of editing and crafting.

Let me know what you think about this wacky endeavor.