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Misty Massey
“All the labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” – Martin Luther King
Yesterday was November 30, the last day of the month and deadline of the Eleventeenth Annual National Novel Writer’s Month. For those few of you who aren’t already clued in, it’s a yearly challenge designed to help reluctant writers break out of their self-imposed limitations and produce 50,000 words in 30 days. In their own words, “Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality.”
I started joining the game back in 2005, but every year I fall far short of the goal. This year was no different. I think I managed somewhere around 12,000 words or so. They’re good words, combined to make good sentences that tell a pretty decent story, if I do say so myself. It’s not even quite 25% of the goal number. I used to feel bad about it.
My problem with NaNo is the same thing that makes it work for many others. The idea is to spill words onto the paper the way water spills over a dam, without hindrance. Thousands of people try this every year, and I know quite a number of them end up with novels that are good enough to sell. It doesn’t work for me. I can’t help editing as I go along. I know, this is a bad idea, I should just write the story and edit later, blah blah blah. Really, I wouldn’t recommend my way of doing things to anyone. It’s slow. Torturously so. But it’s the way I roll. As the Reverend King said in the quote above, I tend toward the painstaking labor rather than the abundant harvest. Yesterday I received the edits for a short story I submitted to an anthology. The editor told me that she’d made very few changes, because the draft I turned in was so clean. That felt incredible. Yeah, it took me a while to get finished, but when I reached the end, I was happy with what I had. I’ve tried, but the NaNo way leaves me so jittery and nervous that writing becomes less fun and more painful. I am happiest when my finished first draft is more like a final. I’m a tortoise.
So congratulations to the NaNo winners! I won’t ever win, but I sure will be standing here cheering you on. Any NaNo winners in the audience today? What does it do for you?
Misty, I don’t NaNo either. I have my reasons, which are not nearly so well laid out as yours, but the greatest one is that I find fast writing to be a source of stress and *that* I don’t need. I’m with you, girl!
Misty, I know many writers who try to put out good quality the first time around. They seem to prefer slow and steady with less revisions. After all the revising I’ve done on my first novel Shadowslayer, I’m going to join that group next time around.
Faith, I haven’t done Nano either. I tried not to write crap and still found I had to revise my stuff over and over. I’m going to make an educated guess that writing fast crap means more words to revise and deeper changes to make. It sounds inefficient to me.
I guess we all write differently, so whatever works.
I looked into NaNo and just couldn’t get into it. I’m the same way. I don’t think I necessarily edit as I go, but I definitely think and weigh everything I’m typing first. I like my writing to be as clean as I can get it before I call the first draft done. I’m not as good with just jotting the words down and then having to go back through and fix it all. Plus, I’m the mad two-finger typist and can only crank out so many words a day that way.
Dave said …writing fast crap means more words to revise and deeper changes to make.
That’s exactly how it feels to me! Trouble is, I always se November coming and think, “This is the year! I can slap out 50K good words, I know I can!” And then I don’t, and I have to remind myself that it’s not a bad thing that I didn’t win.
I’ve never been the NaNo type either. Slow and steady, editing as I go, producing clean drafts that need relatively little polishing. We’ll see how long that lasts as I take on my next few projects….
I’m somewhere in the middle. I take a long time getting as much clear in my head before I start physically writing. Then, with short stories, I try to write the whole thing in as few sittings as possible knowing I’ll revise two or three times at least. With a novel, I do the same process but in 50-100 pages chunks rather than an entire novel. It works for me. I’ve heard of people succeeding with NaNo but I just don’t see how. And if you read the agent blogs, they hate the whole idea because it means December is going to fill their mailboxes with hundreds of queries for work that most likely isn’t ready for publication.
I’ve done NaNo since 2002. It gave me a necessary one month deadline and the community support to start writing again, and after a few years of NaNo I knew I wanted to make publication my goal. I now write year-round and have the publication credits to prove it, and I continue to edit my novel manuscripts. Honestly, I don’t NEED NaNoWriMo anymore, but I still do it out of tradition. It’s just part of the holiday season for me.
I tried NaNo for the first time this year. My little ticker claims I wrote 855 words. That’s wrong. I didn’t win, but I wrote somewhere more like 20,000. One of the main reasons I decided to give NaNo a go is that I wanted to try out the forums. They were a great deal of fun, and distraction, and diversion–and they were so much more active than any forum I’ve ever been on. So that was great. Wasn’t great that some people took shots at me for my low reported wordcount, but still.
I think I am more of a tortoise writer, though for different reasons than Misty. I am a “discovery” writer (as I’ve heard it described a few places.) A panster (as I’ve seen elsewhere). I don’t do outlines, and I work through stuff before during and after the writing. So, NaNo’s short time to write a lot is not a good fit for how I write. I need time between writing periods to work on the deep structure of the story, such as continuity revisions, plot arc changes, scene changes, coming up with where the hell the story is going to go next. This requires thinking time. I can think and write at the same time, but both tend to suffer.
So, while I plan to try again next year, I’m not too worried about whether I’ll win or not. I prefer quality over quantity, and the less I have to revise a finished draft, the better.
So i tried a mini Nano (called IndyWriMo) that was 30k. I was really excited when I finished above 50% by the end of the month w/ almost 16k words. I’m still worried about going back and reading through all that I have written–trying to limit how much i tighten up as i go–and end up hacking out large sections. Its intimidating. I have learned something from this though.
My pace is about 4k words/week. I can make that work around my day job (which is really a 2nd shift job) and demands on me from other sectors of my life. I shoot to write 800 words each weekday when I don’t see my family or friends (working before work, at “lunch”, and a little before bed, when I’d type up my words from lunch and rework some other scenes). If I didn’t make the goal, I still had the weekends to write when everyone else is asleep and I was on my crazy work schedule.
I too am a tortoise.
So are most of the people who did IndyWriMo with me. I was a keeper of stats and the highest reported level was 18k. As a community, we’ve decided to do it again in December. You’re welcome to come join. I think we’re actually a colony of Tortoises and we enjoy the mutual support.
*You’re all welcome to come join
Ive tried nano for several years running but have never won, mostly because I am a slow writer. I can’t say my first drafts are great but I think I demand more quality than Nano requires. I did, however, get to the halfway mark which was my personal goal this year. Nano gives me the push to write a little more each day and also, through meetups, write with fellow writers. Writing is such a solitary pursuit that it was nice to meet other writers and actually write and bounce ideas or ask a question while writing.
I actually write pretty fast and then come back to edit later (as I’ve said before), but the idea of doing it to someone else’s schedule leaves me cold. I write when I have something to write. Till I do forgedaboutit.
I did Nano last year for the first time (Too much going on this year to do it). I won, writing 70k words in 22 days, with a complete first draft. I’m a naturally fast writer, so that wasn’t even the quickest I’ve completed a whole novel, but what it did for me was motivate me to write every day. Sometimes I need a kick in the keester to get me off the web, and back on the story.
Misty,
But it was not my first completed novel.
This was my first Nano and I won.
I still have about 30k to add to my Nano novel, and whether it’s a first draft for me or not, my writing improves the more I write and the more I learn. This draft for me was better than my last “polished” novel.
I have to admit, I write fast. I don’t write every day (I know, I know, I’m supposed to write every day). What I do is write about 5000-7000 words in a sitting. I’ll sit for several hours and produce two to three chapters. Since I can do this about once a week with my schedule, it works for me. I’ve always been a fast writer.
I’ve written this way in a lot of things. I had a published short story (flash piece) that I wrote in about an hour, maybe two, and edited over two days. Very few changes. I’ve done that with a few pieces.
If I try to edit along the way, I’m pretty sure I’d never finish (especially now, since I’m in the mucky middle of a novel–all I want it to get through this part to the end!)
I know when I’m “done” with the novel, I’ll have a metric ton (or twelve) of revisions, but that’s okay. I get the feeling I would anyway. The story changes as I write it, and I just keep plugging away at it and make notes for later changes. It is working for me at this point!
I have completed a NaNoWriMo novel every year since ’03. From ’06 to ’08 they came in at just over 100K words each; this year’s was around 97K (didn’t run out of time, ran out of story).
I see the value in two ways, neither of which, in my mind, is a benefit to a published writer:
1. It gives you an (artificial) deadline. Without a deadline, some aspiring writers tend to say “I can start (whenever)” or if they’ve started, “I can finish (whenever)”. Of course, (whenever) never comes. If you’re a published writer, of course you don’t need this because you have REAL deadlines.
2. It gives you an excuse to everyone else you deal with in the world as to why you are sitting down and writing and not doing any of the other hundred things that demand your attention. Again, if you’re a published writer, you don’t need any excuses – it’s your job to write. But if you aren’t a “professional” writer yet, everyone assumes that literally everything else in the world should take precedence over your writing. At least that’s the case for me. With NaNo, you can say “It’s just for this month. Whatever else I have to do – don’t worry, I’ll get to it in December.”
As for submitting in December… please. I’ve only submitted two of mine, both more than a year and multiple editing passes later.