Why You Should Do NaNoWriMo (and why I'm not) by John Bullock

Ask any number of successful writers for advice on your own writing career and you're very likely to get the same response.

Write. Write. Write.

Every creative profession (musical, artistic, etc) has a joke at its expense, and author's are no different. Ours goes something like this;

Person 1: “I'm writing a novel.”
Person 2: “Oh, what a coincidence; neither am I.”

There is no way of knowing truly how many people resolve to write a novel and never even get as far as putting a word on the screen. Maybe they never make time to write, maybe they procrastinate with index cards and whiteboards, never actually making a start on the story itself. Maybe they are just scared that they're not good enough, or that they'll fail. These fears are not unfounded. You might not be good enough, you might fail, but if you don't start putting words to page, you'll never write a novel, either.

That's where NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) comes in.

The challenge is write a fifty thousand word (at least) manuscript in one month (at most). Nobody expects your NaNo novel to be a masterpiece, in fact I've heard it said by one editor that publishers dread December for the sheer number of poorly written, unedited and full of plot hole NaNo manuscripts that are sent to them by excited NaNo participants who have written their first novel.

Truthfully, your NaNo will probably be garbage. The idea may be amazing, and there could be dialogue gold in there, but it will most likely be rife with typos and contain a plot holier than a religious text. Such is the reality of first drafts, but you will have a first draft!

You see, for one month, all the pressure of writing well is taken away. Most people will struggle to find the time to write an average of 1,700 words a day, and that mad rush to get enough words out to meet the goal takes your mind away from the obsessive urge to go back and edit what you've just written, and therein lies the good; you should participate in NaNoWriMo because it pushes you over that initial hump. It gets you past the first hurdle that an astounding number of would-be writers fall at, before ever being rejected by an agent or publisher.

That said, the title of this post contained a slight addendum, and that is why I am not participating in NaNoWriMo this year.

I am not a published or, by any significant yardstick, successful author, so why would I ignore advice that I feel is worth giving? Well, putting thirty, fifty or even a hundred thousand words onto a page in some assemblance of order has never been my issue. Indeed, I took part in National Novel Writing Month 2010, and achieved my fifty thousand words with almost a week to spare.

You may think I'm gloating, but far from it. You see, those fifty thousand words that made up my entry for last years NaNoWriMo are still sat on my hard drive and, for the most part, they are exactly the same as they were last November!

A blank page has never been a hassle to me, a full page on the other hand...

In addition to last years NaNo script, I have a hundred thousand word manuscript in the second draft stage that I've been writing on and off for three years, a forty thousand word novel that is very nearly finished and will [hopefully] be self-published before the end of this year, and somewhere in the region of five fully formed and outlined ideas for other stories.

I am a serial non-finisher. Why am I not participating in NaNoWriMo? Because it would, in no uncertain terms, be an act of procrastination.

I fully recommend NaNoWriMo as a means to get over the blank page hurdle or, if you haven't any other projects on the go, just for fun. But, if you're like me, don't put your other projects on hold for one month of unadulterated writing. You know you can do that already. Force yourself, like I am, to miss out on the fun of National Novel Writing Month in exchange for actually finishing a novel.

Remember, there's always next year.