NaNoWriMo, or Teens in Space

Hi all. It’s been a crazy couple of months in writing land, and I’ve been flat chat trying to get my manuscript up to snuff. In fact, I’m still flat chat – but right now I’m giving my sponge-cake brain a rest and taking a little time to talk about NaNoWriMo.

Yep, it’s that time of year again. Has it really been twelve months already? It feels like yesterday that I was cranking out some ~1,700 words per day on my young adult dystopian tale, which still doesn’t have any proper title besides The Verge (although that’s better than what I was calling it in my head as I was writing: TEENS IN SPACE. Hey, it’s like it says on the tin).

Let me backtrack a little. For those who don’t know, National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is a creative writing project that runs every November. There are no real incentives, no prizes, no accountability – just you, trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days. The initiative has resulted in a few published novels, like Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen) and The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern). But for the most part, it’s just a cool challenge and a way to keep motivated on a long project.

Last year I managed to hit my 50,000 word goal a few days ahead of schedule. When I mention this, a lot of people ask “so, what did you win?” Well, I won bragging rights about something that most people don’t know or care about, and a sense of accomplishment, and a cool downloadable certificate with my name on it. That’s all. “So, like, that doesn’t mean it automatically gets published or anything?” No. Definitely not. It may be roughly manuscript-sized and manuscript-shaped, but it’s still raw and steaming – a juicy flank sliced straight off the cow.

I’ve glanced over The Verge (I really need a proper title) a time or two since last November – and look, despite drafting it at lightning speed without much editing, there’s still a lot that I like about it. But – and this is a pretty big but (and I cannot lie) – it does feel a little…tainted…by how it was written.

What do I mean? Well, in my natural habitat, I’m a pretty ‘clean’ drafter. Not to say that my first drafts are perfect (ha ha, no), or that they bear much resemblance to the end product. But I do spend time thinking about what I’m writing, going back and forth over word choices, reading and re-reading passages to see how they could be better, and so on. I don’t do what a lot of writers call the “vomit draft,” where you just throw everything at the page and see what sticks. My first draft tends to be tidy, quite sparse, and basically logical.

But the nature of NaNoWriMo is that you really have to lean into the “vomit draft” approach. 1,700 words per day isn’t a huge amount – but it has to be every day. Even when you’re coming home late on a Friday, or you’re feeling sick, or your friends are complaining because they hadn’t seen you in three weeks. Sure, you can skip a day and make it up later – but that’s a dangerous game, and one that’s likely to spiral out of control at any second.

So you vomit. Just… bleeergghh. Can’t figure out how to block that scene? No time to think about it – just put down “she walked to the door,” highlight it, and revisit in December. Not sure if that fog was more murky, or soupy, or clinging? Well, just pick one and move on.

The result: a manuscript that’s not bad, but also not the absolute best I could make it at the time. Not appreciably better than other first drafts I’ve produced. And I want to be better! The average age to publish a debut novel is apparently 36, so I figure I’m still hitting my stride. When I look at my draft for The Verge, I think, eh, this is about as good as my drafts when I was 25. And that’s a little discouraging.

Does it mean I’m never revisiting this story, or never doing NaNoWriMo again? Nah. I have some reservations about the concept as a whole – specifically, I think that it promotes a scary ‘drill sergeant’ approach to writing that kinda sucks the joy out of it – but there’s no denying it gets results. Even if The Verge does moulder and perish, I think I learned a lot, especially about how to outline and how to stick to a plan.

So do I actually recommend that people do NaNoWriMo? Look, I think it’s a fun thing to do at least once in your life. Give it a go. The worst you can do is fail (and most people do) – but even if you end up with nothing but a few chapters and an outline, well, that’s not a bad start. And after you’ve tried it once, you can decide whether that sort of crazy, high-intensity, tight-deadline, slam-out-them-words approach actually works for you. Maybe it doesn’t. But it can’t hurt to keep an open mind.

What I’m Reading: Kingdom of Ash, by Sarah J Maas. I was a latecomer to Sarah and only read Throne of Glass maybe two or three months ago as part of my ‘market research’. The first book didn’t grab me much, but I’m glad I kept going, because the rest of the series is a lot of fun. Looking forward to seeing how this crazy adventure wraps up.