I'm a little late in blogging about it, but November is National Novel Writing Month, where tens of thousands of intrepid professional and amateur writers try and write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Now, before I even move any further into this post, let me say that there is no way in hell I would ever attempt to do such a crazy thing. This annual event is like the writing equivalent of an ultra-marathon, 100 miles of sheer hell--at least that's how I see it.

The interesting thing about National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) is that writers all across the world come together to support each other in this endeavor. Check it out here! My friend Monte has done NaNoWriMo several times, I believe, and he is valiantly striving again this year. Other blogs and websites have erupted around the internet tracking and talking about people's progress.

As I have admitted before (and my editors can attest), I am a slow writer. Although experience has helped me increase my "throughput," I generally average about 2,000-2,500 words in an 8-hour day of writing. This might be fine if I wrote full time, but having any sort of other job severely cuts into writing time. Right now, I have about 2 hours a day to write, and some of that time overlaps with the active, berserk frenzy of my two siberian huskies--not exactly an ideal creative situation. I'm lucky if I can spill 750 words in that time frame.

Part of the issue is that I don't really turn off my internal editor. The thought of just typing what initially comes out of my brain on to the page is vaguely repugnant. Without even trying, I can come up with some amazingly clichéd and inspiringly bad drek which needs to be reworked before it can even be called First Draft worthy. I've tried it before, and the experience left me unsettled and on edge. It was almost impossible for me to move on to the next sentence with the newly crafted one looking coyote ugly.

In any event, its clear that many first time and amateur writers throw themselves into NaNoWriMo with intense abandon and passion. For some (or perhaps many), the idea of writing a novel is intoxicating, and they undertake it with a great deal of pretention, thinking deep thoughts as they earnestly throw words on to a page. I admire them for that--their willingness to pursue a dream, however unattainable. Ultimately, they have more courage than I, who has never buckled on his shield and sallied forth to battle the blank page in such a frenzied way.

If I'm honest, however, I also have to admit that my attitude about NaNoWriMo sometimes resembles this:

 Part of this attitude is, I'm sure, residual post-traumatic stress from reading the slush pile regularly over at Wizards of the Coast's Book Publishing division. You have not stared into the abyss of dreadful writing until you peruse the slush pile--and find its lidless eye gazing back at you!

101 Reasons to Stop Writing has a great summary of how that shadow side of my personality looks at all this NaNoWriMo stuff:

National Novel Writing Month is here once again to unleash the holy fury of a hundred thousand talentless wannabes who think that writing fifty thousand words in 30 days will earn them a steak at Larry McMurtry’s next barbecue, a paperback deal which values their efforts at $10 per word, and a seat next to Maya Angelou on Oprah’s next Book Club show.

 

Last year’s efforts topped out at almost 80,000 participants, almost 13,000 of whom completed the challenge, totalling almost 1 billion words, some of it almost readable. NaNo’s media kit also lists almost 20 participants who have subsequently been published, from almost 225,000 total participants over seven years. That’s a phenomenal success rate of 0.009%. This is about as close as anyone has gone to proving the Infinite Monkey Theory in real world conditions. (Yes, I’m going to use that gag every year.) 

On a serious note, I discovered that NaNoWriMo does raise a good deal of money to support classroom teachers and creative writing programs--something that is definitely needed as our public schools shut down "non-essential" classes and programs because of the money being poured down a rabbit hole to slow down the erosion of student performance in core curriculum areas (math, science, reading, etc.).

Anyway, it's possible that NaNoWriMo is just the exercise that the doctor ordered to help cure me of my internal editor-itis. But as they say, sometimes the cure is worse than the illness!

Good luck to everyone involved this month!