Post-NaNoWriMo, Day 1: It’s Not About The Novel

Just a note: I’d hoped to blog frequently during my NaNoWriMo experience, but, as anyone who’s done it successfully will tell you (wish I’d have known!), your brain sorta turns to mush as you write and logical thought processes often take a back seat to the actual creative writing. Over the next few days, I’ll be organizing and posting my thoughts & experiences with NaNoWriMo–a process I firmly believe has made me a much better writer.
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I’ve wanted to undertake NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, an November tradition for writers the world over, for several years now. How do I know this? I originally registered at the site in 2006 (it says so…) but didn’t have the courage (or the idea for a novel-length work) to actually dive in. As the years have passed, I’ve grown further from fiction writing and closer to essay and non-fiction writing, so when an idea struck last year–right about this time–for a book of essays on cooking and food, something in my mind triggered the thought of NaNo, and I decided this would be the year and that book of essays would be my “project”.

When you tell a non-writer you’re planning to do 50,000 in a month, they have one of two reactions: complete indifference or complete disbelief. There’s no happy medium, no chatting about what it will entail. Non-writers already don’t understand how we can spend so much time loving on words and phrases, and they think we’re a bit quacked to say the least–either way.

Tell a writer you’ve signed up for NaNo and you get one of two reactions: “Oh, wow, I could never do that!” or, “Oh, wow! That sounds like fun! Good luck!” Fortunately for me, about 98% of my writing friends were in the latter group.

For some writers, however, the notion of conquering the hill of 50K is too much to contemplate. Mixed reactions dot the landscape of the doubters. Maybe they don’t have that much of a story to tell, or maybe they are perfectionists and can’t lay down a sentence without it being sparkling. Maybe they can’t write in the face of potential failure (though, I believe, getting down even a thousand words is a win–those are a thousand words you didn’t have before). And some writers find any and every excuse to sit out and watch from the sidelines because it would compromise the purity of their process, the sanctity of their story.

I’m here to tell you–NaNoWriMo is not about the story. It’s about the writing. Messy, ugly, painful at times…and that’s only in the first week. It only gets worse as you continue on the path. NaNo isn’t about creating a novel that will sell (though, evidently, according the their site, a few have), it’s about one thing and one thing only: writing. Not editing, though some use the excuse of editing to drop out. Not creating vivid, lovable characters with a fatal flaw, but writing 1,667 words a day (on average) to keep yourself going toward that finish line. Not working through the delicate strands of your multi-layered plot, but forcing yourself to believe, in the middle of week 2, that all these unrelated words and off-topic tangents are really helping you be a better writer in the long run even if they make no sense now.

NaNo is about writing, pure and simple. It’s about hitting a wall and chipping through that wall with an ice pick because you can’t leap it in a single bound. Nano is meant to prove that you can go from zero to 50K words in 25 days and live to tell about it (in your blog). Nano makes it OK to stumble on grammar, end sentences with prepositions and abandon spell check. (Or, in my case, when I’d made too many spelling errors due to inept typing and got a box that said “You’ve made too many errors and spell check will now stop correcting”, spell check abandons YOU). Nano gets you writing and keeps you writing until the bitter end, forcing you to forget your dreams of perfection and NYT best-sellerdom. It forces you to write for the sake of writing.

And that’s why I loved it. I hesitate to say “loved it every second” because that’d be a definite lie. But I loved what it did, what it forced me to do and how I learned, from the start line and my dreams of a pretty little draft to the end line with a wildly divergent set of essays, to do what I loved most:

Write. Wildly, passionately, without worry or fear or theme. And isn’t that why we pick up a pen in the first place?

How about my other WriMos out there? What lessons did NaNoWriMo teach you?