NaNoWriMo and Me
Hi, I’m Nicole, and I love National Novel Writing Month. I’m only saying this because there was a time that I never believed I’d say that. I’d see bloggers and forum posters talk about NaNoWriMo and I’d wonder who these insane people were, trying to write a novel in 30 days. I had short stories on my laptop that I’d been working on for years and never finished.
I cannot think of a time when I didn’t love to write, but I can think of a long time when I did almost no fiction writing at all. I got really frustrated by the parade of rejection slips I got when I sent out short stories, and so I spent most of the 90s and 00s posting rants about my life on blogs and online journals. I liked the instant gratification of comments and emails, as well as the occasional links from really popular blogs.
But there was always a little voice in the back of my head, the Fiction Voice, wondering when I was going to let it out to play again.
In mid-October 2011 I flew out to Los Angeles to be on “Jeopardy,” and after that was over, I wondered “Gee, self, how the heck am I going to top that?”
I noticed that NaNoWriMo was on the horizon again, and I thought about this story idea I’d had in my head for years. I’d even tried writing some of it down but I didn’t have the discipline to do it every day, and the story existed in a few short and disconnected fragments on my old PowerBook.
On October 29, I made up my mind. I was in. I was going to get that story out of my brain and in draft form.
You know how NaNo folks like bickering about pantsing v. planning? Reader, I pantsed the shit out of this thing. I knew the beginning of the story and the ending, and I had ideas for a couple of scenes midway. But I also knew that if I tried to sit down and work out an outline, I’d get freaked out and quit. I didn’t want to give my brain a chance to notice what I was doing. “Wait, what — you want us to write a whole novel? Haha, I don’t think so.”
So November began and I banished my Inner Editor and told myself that it didn’t matter if what I wrote sucked because I could go back and fix it later. Some days the words flew from my fingers, and I’d be way past the 1667 daily allotment before I was ready to knock off for the day. But then there were the days I’d feel like I was mining my brain with a toothpick just to scrape out 300 words.
But I kept going, and in late November of 2011 I passed the 50,000 word mark and completed that draft. I couldn’t believe it. I’d written a novel. Not a good novel. Not a novel that anyone else but myself would ever be able to get through. But I’d done it.
I followed the excellent advice of the NaNoWriMo founders and didn’t even look at that draft until January of 2012. And boy, was it bad. My novel’s explanation for the weird, terrible things going on was basically “Nobody knows why these terrible things are happening; they just do.” Not exactly the world’s most riveting premise.
And I’d thought I was creating a new kind of monster rather than reusing the old YA chestnuts of vampires and werewolves. When I reviewed my draft, I realized that my so-very-original monsters were nothing more than cut-rate, bargain basement Dementors. They even made everything around them turn cold when they showed up. How the hell I’d failed to notice that when I was writing, I’ve no idea, but the realization smashed me in the face like a brick.
But I had a draft. The only thing worse than a really shitty first draft is no draft at all.
And I’ve done NaNoWriMo every year since then and won every time. One of my novels is polished up to the point I’m ready to start sending it out to agents and publishers, and I think another one has that same possibility with a little more work. And there are a couple efforts that are likely to remain on my hard drive as practice efforts and nothing else.
But I love all of it. I love the feeling when I’ve had a tough writing day but pass the 1667 mark anyhow. I love going on the NaNoWriMo forums and being around all these other people doing the same crazy thing I am. My people. I love that NaNoWriMo really made me sit down and think about the mechanics of writing a novel-length story. OK, my characters are at Point F and I need them to be at Point Z by the end of the story. How do I get them there in a way that’s interesting and also believable?
And finally, NaNoWriMo turned me into a fiction writer again, and that was a part of me I’d once thought was long since lost.
