On the value of NaNoWriMo

In short: solid goals and accountability

This year I have decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. It seems to be a more North American thing, so I was only vaguely aware of it, and never considered it seriously until a fellow blogger mentioned it.

At first I thought it was too great a challenge — 50,000 words is a lot! And I also (a little snobbishly) thought it was unnecessary — if you want to write a novel, if you’re truly capable of writing a novel (and not everyone is: just as not everyone is capable of being an artist or a doctor or whatever) you wouldn’t need to participate. The whole writing process is, and should be, solitary — and if you can’t hack that, don’t bother.

This was of course mistaken — people have written 50,000 words in 30 days, and while the act of writing is solitary, planning and finding ideas does not necessarily have to be and discussion leads to better outcomes. I’ve only recently joined and I have already started some interesting conversations which I hope will provide some good motivation to reach the goal! ‘Buddies’ as they are called on NaNoWriMo (did I mention it’s North American?) also provide accountability- kindly prompting each other to keep going. Announcing a project is also useful, especially if you don’t have friends/relatives who are seriously interested in reading or writing.

Perhaps having such a definite goal will create a sense of urgency/direction which is useful if, like myself, you can be too relaxed so projects take longer than they should to complete. And that sense of ‘urgency’ should help the writer, I speculate, to invest in the character’s own goal/s.

Sir Galahad and his horse probably pondering what’s for tea, or how on earth they’re supposed to achieve their goal (the Grail)- a slight hint at the subject matter of my novel!

I like that there is flexibility (you can write whatever you want, even screenplays). It is important to ensure that the 50,000 word goal doesn't become a sort of holy grail - it doesn't matter if you write 49,999 or less. However I think this can be taken too far. It is good to have a fairly concrete goal. It is hard work so can’t be approached with a wishy-washy attitude. The value of NaNoWriMo is the discipline and the specificity of it — a certain number of words, over a certain number of days on one particular project: a novel. I have assumed that there is a wisdom in this apparently arbitrary number, and the people at NaNoWriMo, looking at the resources, seem to know what they’re talking about.

Overall, I think NaNoWriMo is one of those great opportunities that makes one glad to be living in the age of the internet. Fortunately I will be working on something I have already drafted, so the worst of it is done. The difficulty will be finding the time to write! So in November I won’t be blogging as such, but I may post some extracts if anyone out there is reading this……….