The idea of punching out a 50.000 word novel in 30 days has plenty of detractors, people who believe that a book must simmer and grow and develop over months or years even to be anything worth reading. I am not one of those people. I write my first drafts quickly and efficiently ... when I have a deadline. It's the not-on-a-deadline part that slows me down, leads me into procrastination and whining. And that's one of the great things about NaNo: it gives everyone a deadline!But this is not the only great thing about NaNo.
Spending an entire month writing virtually every day can do wonders for turning the act of sitting down at a keyboard or with a pen and paper into a habit. Now, this is not a habit I currently have, but I'm hoping it will develop over the next thirty days. You want to know why? No, not just because then I could write more books in a year (bonus!) but because the more you write, the better you get. It's that whole practice makes perfect idea, except when it comes to writing it's more like practice makes better because there's no such thing as a perfect book (Hunger Games excepted).
Knowing that you have to write your 1667 words each day, no matter what, has another perk: it takes away all excuses for writer's block. (Note: I don't believe in writer's block. I believe in procrastination. I believe in not having enough of the story figured out to continue. Both of these are often explained away as writer's block, but that mythical malady does not exist.)Another benefit to NaNo is that it forces the write to pick a single project and see it through to completion. As someone with clinical BADD (book attention deficit disorder) I know all about starting and abandoning projects, about getting fifty pages in and deciding that another, shinier, newer idea is better. For NaNo you have to pick just one project to work on and keep chiseling away at that story until you read the end. Which leads to the final and most important benefit...
You finish a book!
Now, it might (will probably) be a crappy book. It might be full of plot holes and flat characters and unmotivated action, but it will be finished. You will have a completed first draft. And there is not feeling in the world like finishing that first book. My first--an unpublishable historical romance--was the hardest thing I'd ever done. But once you finish that first book, then the next one seems less daunted because, well, you've already done this before. This frees you up to pay more attention to craft the second time around because you're not worried about whether you can finish. You'll know you can.All of these are things that completing NaNo can do for you. November 30 isn't the end of the story, of course. You'll have to take that crappy first draft and mold and model it into something worth reading--and selling--and if you're anything like me, that part of the process will take twice as long as the writing part. But as the inimitable Nora Roberts once said:
You can fix a bad page, you can't fix a blank one.
So get out there and right some bad pages. You can fix them next month.
Hugs,
TLC
PS. Buddy me on NaNo, my username is teralynnchilds.
