Hi – welcome to my new monthly blog column (blogumn?). I was invited to share some thoughts here, and I’ll be doing my best to keep to the schedule. Expect me to mostly blog about writing, and I hope they’ll be entertaining and maybe even useful.

So, off to the first one.

NaNoWriMo and the pros

There is likely no writer alive who hasn’t heard about NaNoWriMo, the attempt to bash out 50,000 words (or a short-ish novel) in the month of November. The rules get tweaked a little every year, and there are people who follow the classic NaNo rules, and the “rebels” who tweak them. If you finish at the end of the month with the desired wordcount, you’re a “winner”. It’s a fun, crazy way to get people writing and lose sleep.

My NaNo record is pretty mixed. In 2007, the first year I heard of that crazy invention, I wrote 50,000 words of a novel and then finished it off I think in February. I was mostly driven along by competitiveness. A friend had dared me by telling me “I don’t think you can do it”, and for about 10 days I agreed, not writing a lot, and then suddenly mobilised a surprising amount of desire to “win”, writing most of the words in the last week. That’s me and deadlines. To me they sound like Stuka sirens when they close in.

However, the book got actually published and is still a favourite.

In the years since then, I tried sometimes but got sidetracked, usually by three or four new book ideas, or by being hip-deep in a book and not wanting to switch to a new project or rush the one I was working on. It felt like cheating to use the event to just add words to an existing book. Also, in some years, November wasn’t a great mental health month for me.

This year, I decided to play along again. When it started, I was about 60,000 words into a historical novel I expect to be about 80,000 words long (my readers will know it as the “Bird book”), and if NaNoWriMo can help me hit that 80,000-word projected end goal, I’ll be a happy camper.

Lots of “pro” writers already have punishing production schedules they impose on themselves. In our genre alone, there are people who write 10,000, 5,000 or 3,000 words a day, every day. To them, NaNoWriMo is barely a warmup. Mind you, I’m not one of them. I’m still trying to get consistently over 1,000 a day, so for me the required 1,667 words a day that a NaNo participant needs to achieve is actually a good stretch – especially when I write historicals that are 95% research and 5% writing.

Also, for some “pro” writers this can all look a bit silly. Most people who take part in NaNo are pure hobbyists who’ve never sold anything. If you read their biographies, many are very young. The forums are full of “beginner questions” (which are very politely and constructively answered – seriously, I haven’t seen even a moment of nastiness where I lurk). In short, to a jaded eye, it’s apparently the one month a year when “civilians” are trying to write a novel, and most of them will return to their individual form of reality come December.

Many of them will encounter all the demons that writers face and decide it’s just too scary out there. (Or rather, in there.) Some will cheat on their wordcounts, others will quietly weep into their coffee, others will have nervous breakdowns, and quite a few will break the rules by editing, or abandon the book as unworkable. Sometimes, you don’t vet an idea before going NaNo on it—and sometimes, that idea just doesn’t carry through. It’s a situation more experienced writers have encountered so often that they have learned to deal with it more or less well (I have a drawer full of novels abandoned halfway through).

Considering all the pitfalls that awaits a person writing a novel, and especially the kind of person who writes their first novel, it’s a miracle that people do “win” NaNos, and some of these books get edited and published. There’s a lot of faith in flinging yourself off the cliff and hoping to grow wings on the way down.

And that, I think, is the true gift of that event. However jaded and “in control” pro writers can appear because we have the page-long backlist and the publication credits and the royalty checks to “prove” we are, like, real authors, and some of us sometimes really do believe we have it all sussed out (on good days, at least), there’s still something intoxicating about taking part in an event that gets everybody fired up about writing, where people help each other, where newbies make a month-long commitment to an idea, sacrificing sleep and nerves and sanity to hit those goals.

For me, it’s really cool to see people we only know as reviewers or readers suddenly pull that novel idea out of a drawer. This month, everybody is a writer. They’re all around us. (Yay, no longer alone!)

Everybody talks writing, and everybody can win. It’s not a competition—you only compete with yourself (and maybe try to beat the wordcount of a buddy). 50,000 words in a month. That’s the rules.

Go forth and write. It’s still time to get registered. Or sit down and add to your wordcount. If you want to “buddy up” for NaNo, I’m Vashtan over there.

Aleksandr Voinov is an emigrant German author living near London, where he is making his living as a full-time writer, freelance editor/writing coach and gentleman at large. He has 15 years’ experience with ghost-writing, book-doctoring and writer coaching and is qualified in hypnosis and TFT to deal with stress, anxiety, and writer’s block.

With more than 40 releases under his belt, he has written horror, science fiction, cyberpunk, and fantasy as well as contemporary, thriller, and historical erotic queer and straight fiction for houses such as Heyne/Random House, Carina Press, Riptide Publishing and Samhain.

In his spare time, he practices massage, explores historical sites, meets other writers and studies complementary therapies. Visit Aleksandr’s website, and his blog, and follow him on Twitter, where he tweets as @aleksandrvoinov.