Be Your Own Editor

You may have heard of an endeavor called National Novel Writing Month, affectionately referred to by its creators and participants as NaNoWriMo (unless they want to avoid sounding really goofy, in which case they refer to it as National Novel Writing Month).

The project is gaining popularity and notoriety every year, and since my friend W. is participating this year (the month in question, by the way, is November), I thought I’d take a closer look and think about how such exercises can help the struggling novelist.

A month, of course, is an awfully short time frame for the completion of a novel, so the goal is kept to a somewhat reasonable 50,000 words (175 pages). This is too short, in many cases, for publishers of fiction, so even if you reach the NaNoWriMo goal, you should expect to have to fill out your draft in rewrites. And, unless you’re blessed with a burst of creative brilliance during the entire month of November, you’ll have to do some rewriting anyway.

The idea behind this, as it was for the class I took through MediaBistro called “Draft Your Novel in Three Months,” is to push forward and concentrate on cranking out pages without getting bogged down in rewriting. I failed (correction: chose not to) complete an entire draft in three months, in part because it would have required the abandonment of sleep, in part because I realized that cranking out pages without rewriting along the way was a writing style that just didn’t work for me.

If you do decide to participate in NaNoWriMo or some similar exercise, don’t obsess over word count. Use it as motivation to keep your butt in the writing chair. That way, instead of feeling like a failure because you didn’t reach 50,000 words, you’ll derive a sense of accomplishment from the 25,000 words you produced, which you otherwise would not have.

Also, that type of exercise works best if you begin with either a work-in-progress or a good idea of the beginning, middle, and end of your story. Otherwise you may end up either with a lot of pages of irrelevant stream-of-consciousness tangents that you need to discard, or with 50,000 words of only stream-of-consciousness tangents, with no narrative focus at all.

The program’s mission statement is a bit schizophrenic: they enthusiastically prod participants to “write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together,” in part so they can mock “real novelists” who “obsess over quality.”

On the other hand, NaNoWriMo writers are told that they will “actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms” and will start the month as [insert non-writing-related job here] and finish it as “novelists.” So are all those frantic writers supposed to be mocking “real novelists,” or becoming them? I see gleeful references to the crappy novels that will be produced, but I see no encouragement to go back and revise those novels afterward, or to use them as a learning experience and then write something else in which you do (gasp!) “obsess over quality.”

I know, it’s meant to be a fun and freeing exercise, and, as I said, you can use it simply as motivation to write in whatever style works for you. But I fear that NaNoWriMo results in a lot of really bad novels whose writers consider them more or less finished but for a little tweaking. If you get to 50,000 (i.e., become a “winner”), congratulate yourself on your industriousness, take a week or two to chill out, and then let the real work of revision begin. Here’s to obsessing over quality!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under A Writer's Life, Writing Classes and Workshops, Writing Contests & Exercises, Writing/Editing Tips: The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.