Some people don’t like nanowrimo.
I understand the objections–that 50,000 words isn’t a book, that writing isn’t enough there has to be the edit, that being focused on the number of words instead of the quality is a mistake. So what though. Sometimes you just need to write 50,000 words and then decide what to do with them after.
The first book I ever finished was for nanowrimo. I’d started plenty, but the scale of it always daunted me. I’d make a strong start and then fumble at around 15-20 thousand words as doubt set in and the siren song of a new idea! promised me inspiration with no commitment. Stacks of half done things. Then I did nanowrimo.
At 20,000 words I didn’t give up because the book wasn’t perfect, the prose exquisite and the plot smooth as clockwork. I just put my head down and ground away at the next 30,000 words. And the 25,000 after that since I did actually finish The Artificer, although it will probably never come out of the digital drawer! I wrote a book. A whole book. And I did it because I wasn’t caught up in the idea of being an author, or writing something that people would love. I just wanted to finish 50,000 words.
Now I have fifteen books under my belt–plus short stories and novellas–and all because I sat down that first November and wrote 50,000 words.
Sometimes what you need to do is just finish something. That first draft might be an ugly Frankenstein’s monster of a thing, ideas stitched together with clumsy segues and abrupt jumps. The thing is, that’s the secret. As far as I know, no authors turn out the first draft that turns, unpolished and unchanged, into the final version that goes to print. It’s the first draft. It’s the sketch of your idea hammered out in words and punctuation, and then you fix it in the edit.
And in the edit of the second draft. Or the third.
You find the typos (I once shot a horse dead through the arse!), hopefully you remember that you’d actually killed ol’ Mike Graham in the first chapter so he can’t turn up in the sixth, and you smooth the joins. Sure you have to set a limit on it. I know people who have worked, for years, on draft after draft that they are never confident in. But even then, if they are happy why not?
Yet for all I love nanowrimo, I haven’t done it in years. Not from any intent. It just never lined up well. It was the busy time at work. People got sick. I had edits. Stuff happened and while I could still write, it just wasn’t nano.
Now it’s 2020 and distractions are at a minimum. So I dusted off my old account (after a few tries to remember my username, and a few more to remember my password!), set up all the pretty, distracting bits, and am…by day 10…more or less on track!
Either way I’ll finish. That’s not all you need to do when you’re writing a book, but is the first thing you need to do.
