NaNoWriMo - Week One

I am sure that many of us have heard of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which officially takes place in November?  I have a friend, as I'm sure many of you will, who took part in this scribbling marathon in 2010.  At the time I was building up my hub library, and working on my own novel, so I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo in November 2011 instead.  After all, a person cannot possibly make time in each month to do absolutely everything they would like to do.

But I did not know then that I was going to be elbowed into undertaking the 50,000-word-novel-in-31-days challenge well before November.  This Christmas I was given the above pictured novel writing kit, put together by the very same Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo.  My mum received a kit also.  We decided not to delay, and began the challenge eight days ago.  I had thought to start in, say, April.  But when I visited my mum just over a week ago, she said 'okay, shall we begin this weekend?' and we were off.  She was quite right, of course, and I realised that I had randomly chosen April as a way of putting the task off.  April would certainly have come and gone, and either I would have just forgotten about the whole novel thing, or I would have found an excuse to put it off for another month, and then another.  Best to just jump straight in, quite right.

And I must say that I have learned some very important lessons in these past eight days.  Some lessons I already knew, from my experiences with other unfinished novels.  But I'd forgotten those lessons, so it was good to relearn them.  I will write more about what I have learned at the end of the thirty-one days though.

When you break it down, fifty-thousand words over thirty-one days is only a little over one-thousand-six-hundred words per day.  Not really all that much (!), and if you sit down with a cup of tea (Earl Grey relaxes me and puts me in sublime writing mode) and a nice bit of Debussey in the background, you can get those words done in a couple of hours.  Easy (!)

Of course, I'm only one week into the journey.  It's been a glorious week, after I finally made that initial decision: which idea to choose.  I texted several people thus: 'ghost story set in 1725, or science fiction set on twin planets with humans at vastly different stages of technological development?'  It was unanimous - ghost story it was.  I began, and lo! the first few hundred words read like the opening of a novel.  Oh my word, this was amazing, a fully edited and perfectly worded novel was pouring out of me.  This task was going to be a doddle for me.  Characters emerged, fully grown and multi-faceted from the outset.  Plot lines suggested themselves, and one in particular seemed very plausible and rather gripping.  I knew exactly where to go to make the plot begin to appear.  I even knew how to write in a few nice points of misdirection, red herrings as it were.

I was having a whale of a time (apologies for the sealife references - my story has a somewhat maritime flavour, which I am finding it difficult to shake off in my other writing).  Surely I would have the whole novel written and ready for publication within the month.  But realisitically, I knew that this word spawning session would not last.  Oh, they are still flowing from me, being deposited in little packets, several hundred words at a time, like tiny little fish eggs, ready to hatch into a shoal of something stunningly beautiful and shimmering.  But I anticipate the arrival of some word eating crabs and other crustaceans very soon, and my roe of inspiration will be gone.  

I'm not being defeatist here, only realistic, and I am preparing myself for hitting the wall.  (I will now switch unapologetically to a running analogy.)  

Runners have a wall that they hit, and that wall is different for every runner.  When I run I hit the wall at about three miles (do you now have an image of me losing my balance and being so weak that I have no control over my legs so that I run headlong into someone's garden wall?).  I do not run far, and can only do about six miles in total.  But I know, when I hit that wall (by now you will understand that it is a virtual wall, and that it will not cause me to have bruised knees) that I have to keep running to get over it and find my 'second wind' (no comment).  It is just the same with writing - though much less physically painful, and marginally less sweaty - and a writer will encounter many walls over the course of a project.  Successful writers (i.e., those who reach the finish line) are those who get over every wall.  So I'm told.  I don't actually know if this is true, since I have never reached the finish line yet.

But anyway, I have completed week one of NaNoWriMo, exceeding my word goal every day bar one.  I have learnt that I can write plenty of good words every day if I just get on with it and stop stalling.  You may also have noticed that I have learned to 'word pad' to an alarming degree, and that I can now pretty much talk about anything, even if it is not related to the topic I am supposed to be discussing.  This is encouraged in NaNoWriMo.  Also encouraged is self-praise, whether truly deserved or not.  So I must tell you that I am doing a truly excellent job of writing my monthlong novel, and you'll never have read anything so fantastic and diverting in your whole life.

I have also learnt that I can write much, much more in a day than I ever dreamed possible.  Which ever writer told me that we should aim for no more than eight-hundred words a day has done me a great disservice!  That writer, whoever she was, is probably underestimating her own abilities - I know it was a woman, but that's all I know.  She, whoever she was, said that if we aimed too high and tried to write, say, fifteen-hundred words, our writing would be worthless and would just be thrown in the trash anyway.  This is so absolutely not the case.  In the past week I have had several days in which I have just been on a roll, and I have steamed ahead and written two-thousand lovely words.  Of course, you have only got my word for that - but hey, I think my word is good enough.

NaNoWriMo, you have changed my life,

You came into my world to bring me strife.

But I will conquer you, demon task,

I'm getting my words down, oh yes, just ... ask!  (ugh, lame!)

(That's why I don't write poetry.)

So, only ... mmm, mental maths, not my strong point ... twenty-three days left to go.  Can I make it to the end, with my brain intact?  You betcha, I can!  My plot is already getting a little thin and leaky, but I am going to perform some wondrous feats of word plumbing on it, don't you worry.  There's no way I could tell you all about beginning NaNoWriMo, and then fail to finish it - how embarrassing would that be?!

Onward →

(Hey, you know, I think this is the way to go, the way to get the novel done that I've been working on almost fruitlessly for three years - JUST WRITE IT!  JUST WRITE IT ALL DOWN, even if it's crap!  I think it will work - it'll be fun finding out...)