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NaNo NaNo!
NaNoWriMo is creeping up on us, and there's now a brand new website for this year's event! Ryan Dunsmuir has written five NaNo Novels and I think in this short FAQ answer (scroll down) he captures pretty well some of the reasons for doing it:This will be my fourth year, and although I've never “won,” the experience has always been incredibly worthwhile. And it is like a habit; it's become one of those things I start thinking about and looking forward to when the weather starts to turn cooler, the days start getting shorter, the leaves change, etc. All of that might mean football and turkey to a lot of Americans, and it means that for me, too, but November is NaNoWriMo, and that's really the best of the fall things. In the same FAQ, Lazette Gifford, who apparently displays “freakish noveling speed,” has a great idea for how to be a NaNo winner:Now it's a habit.... November without a novel would seem empty, and I'd feel a little like I was missing out. There are always new people to recruit too, which can remind you just how totally ridiculous, yet amazing, noveling is. And if you've ever seen writers as the elite (as in, “how do they DO that? I could never write”) this is the perfect chance to crash their party. All you need is a looming deadline, some peer pressure/support, and lots of caffeine. The most important question to ask in order to reach your word count, and one of the hardest things for our goal-obsessed society to get a handle on, is not to ask what are you writing FOR, but ... what are you writing? You're writing a novel! How cool is that?
An outline!? I sort of thought that was cheating, but look, it's not (scroll down). Now I'm thinking: Brilliant idea! The hard part is figuring out which of the many different ideas in my head is really anything more than a scene or a short story. Some pre-thinking will be happening in the next two weeks and maybe that will be what I need to push me past the 30k or so words I usually stall at.
Posted October 12, 2004 07:29 AM | NaNoWriMo
Thanks for the reminder. Now I need to make sure and get ahead in my reading.
I thought outlines were cheating, too, at least written ones.
Posted by: Steve at October 12, 2004 10:06 AM
Thanks for bringing this event to my attention- what an incredible idea! I am very excited to start. This should keep me busy while I wait to hear back from Admissions.
Posted by: Sui Generis at October 12, 2004 02:30 PM
This sounds pretty interesting but November is when I barely start paying any attention to school, so it's not really the best novel-writing month for me. When I first saw this via Soup's place, I thought it was the beginning of a joke (Monty Python and the "Novel Writing" sporting event where Thomas Hardy sits down to write his next novel). I think you could sympathize with Hardy and his writer's block after listening to that sketch. : )
Posted by: E. McPan at October 12, 2004 09:34 PM
That is such a cool idea. Can we read it when you're done?
Posted by: CM at October 13, 2004 11:46 AM
To all those who are about to write: I salute you! (That's the slogan on one of the NaNo t-shirts this year.) The world really needs more seriously bad novels or novel-attempts, so the NaNo ethos is "the more the merrier!" There's really something about the shared misery and joy of struggling to put together a coherent narrative of 50k words or more that just can't be duplicated any other way.
CM: As they say somewhere in the sticks: Heyall no! ;-)
Trust me, if this year's attempt is anything like those from previous years, it will be all but completely unreadable to anyone but me. If I posted it online, no one would get past page five w/otu becoming seriously ill. If it turns out better than that, sure, I'll share -- just as soon as my publisher can get it to your local bookstore. ;-)
Posted by: ambimb at October 13, 2004 12:00 PM
