Have you already kicked off then?
For those unawares, November is host to simply the best mass literary get-together of all time. Or at least, in my life time, it is. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month is that time of year we can squish a whole entire novel, or at least 50,000 words of it (yes, FIFTY THOUSAND) into a mere 30 calendar days. And how do we manage to fit it in amongst the day job and the ironing and catching up with X-Factor or however you spend your weekend? Why, with mass support of at least 100,000 folk around the globe all taking part.
That’s what I simply love about this. Now, I’m pretty motivated once I set my mind to something. Scrap that, once I’ve set my mind to something, I’m positively stubborn. So if I’d ever had said before ‘I’ll write a novel in a month, I will I will’ I would have.
But honestly, the idea never popped into my head, and had, it I would have poked it back down into a darkened crevice.
But take me back a year. Someone simply said ‘Are you starting NaNoWriMo tomorrow?’ ‘No,’ I reply, ‘What’s that?’
I regret to say, that in the ten years of it’s existence, I’d never even heard of it before, come to think of it, not even during my creative writing course at university – although I’m particularly good at not hearing vital information during seminars.
But with a quick read up on the web, I decided, ‘You know what, I’m only going to bloody well do it!’ I tried to quickly recruit a friend for moral support, but due to their work commitments and lack of self belief, they sadly never made it past 100 words and I was left to tackle the task alone.
I stuck with it though. I’d had no time to plan, prepare or plot but still galloped away head first. Luckily, the mantra is ‘Quantity, not quality’ which is perfect, as I had nothing more than an artist living in a flat and the last Stephen King novel I’d read rolling around in my head.
The best bit of advice I was given through all the pep talks from the creators, was ‘tell everyone you know that you’re doing it.’ It’s easy to give up on yourself, let yourself down and decide you’ll finish your novel next year, or at least after Christmas. Inevitably, once you start thinking like that, you’ll never progress past chapter five.
So, full steam ahead I told my family, my friends, and proceeded to update my facebook status daily with my ‘out-of-fifty-thousand’ word count. That way I’d have to let down 100+ people as well as myself.
Luckily, I managed to get through the extremely terrible horror tale in good time.
The chief idea is to keep on writing, don’t read back, don’t edit just keep going. All that matters is you produce a beginning, a middle and an end and you make that hefty target. A hefty target that’s still 20,000 or so words off decent novel length, but come on, this is in a month.
Hopefully then, you’re left by November 30th, with a huge file on your hard drive that you can call your very own novel. It will most likely, be pretty awful.
But it’s the start. The start that the majority of us never manage to make. You can edit it, re-edit it or (please don’t) delete it at your leisure. But you got through it. You made words and you made so many of them you made the equivalent of a book. It’s how almost every novel starts out. So yes, it’s terrible. But it’s terribly beautiful too.
The piece I wrote last year, however, was simply terribly terrible and I haven’t bothered to edit it, or even read it back. I knew from the moment I wrote that my main character’s art studio was upstairs (in his one-floor flat) that it was so riddled with mistakes and boring passages that I don’t have the heart to give it any more attention. At least not for some time yet.
This year however, I spent a good couple of hours over the course of the last week preparing and planning and am attempting another first.
I’m going to write a black comedy. Or try to. I can’t say how comedic it’s going to be yet, I’m hoping that alongside my 2k a day word target I’m going to find some time to do a little reading and research too.
But my inspiration? This blog. Back in September, at the very start of this blog, I decided I would write a blog a day. And I told you, in entry one, and I said it so many times (as I did last year with my novel) that I didn’t want to let anyone down by not doing it. I made it to the end, and produce a few snippets along the way.
In particular, I did a few ‘Character Creations’ from photos I found on the web. One of these led me to another idea, which evolved and grew and eventually became the plot for my novel this year.
I’m so glad I started this blog, and that I discovered NaNoWriMo. As always, if you want to write, to be a writer, the most important thing is to just get started. Make those words. You never know where your first sentence might take you – just don’t give up.
If anyone wants to add me as a writing buddy on NaNoWriMo, my username is ebishop24
Take care, and look after your typey fingers,
E x
