Every November, writers feel a certain tingle - besides the changes in the weather! It is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and it presents potential authors with a very specific challenge. As its webpage illustrates, those who dare to undertake this quest must spend the month of November writing a novel of no less than fifty thousand words. The real question, entering yet another year of NaNoWriMo, is: How the heck do you write 50,000 words in a month?
NaNoWriMo Puts Quantity over Quality - Or Does It?
First of all, there is no specific guideline as to what constitutes an acceptable novel. For all anyone cares, and as their website recommends strongly against, you can write absolute jibberish or simply repeat the same word over and over again in order to achieve this goal. The system is fairly simple; you input your novel into a text-reading script, it counts the number of words you've written, and hurray! If that number is greater than or equal to fifty grand, you win!
Getting there takes determination. When one takes the number of words and divides it up into a daily quota, one finds themselves needing 1,667 words per day (rounded up for the sake of numbers). That means that every day, participants have to get behind their computer screen and write a large amount of work regardless of circumstances; or, they have to increase their output drastically on some days in order to accommodate less productive ones. Sick? Rough day at work? Too bad - either produce, or fall by the wayside. Can't come up with a good idea? Tough luck, suck it up or - as many do - simply throttle back on the quality control. After all, fifty thousand words and victory, or bust!
Its never that simple, of course. NaNoWriMo uses terminology that is usually reserved for contests - those who complete it are "winners," while those who contend are participants. It therefore comes as a surprise to some that said contestants (often called WriMo's) aren't competing against one another. Nobody ever has to read what you, the WriMo, actually write aside from a computer program! No, the content of the novel is solely yours to worry about, and this puts the competition in a new light.
Why Write a Novel in in November?
Ultimately, the question of participating in NaNoWriMo is going to be different for every author. Many do it simply because their friends are doing it, but that's not the greatest of reasons. Without a personal drive to succeed, many such entrants are doomed to failure. While the basic outline of the task is easy enough to accomplish by compromising quality, the real challenge comes when one uses it as a chance for self-improvement.
All too often, authors use the term "Writer's block" to describe an inability to perfectly phrase something. NaNoWriMo forces these creators to break through their own limits. Some have trouble scheduling regular work hours and ultimately procrastinate their way into never completing their work! This "contest" solves that, too; it has a very mathematically simplistic quota of work to accomplish, and in the weeks leading up to it even the worst planner has a chance to budget some time.
Most of all, however, is the competition against oneself. Its the challenge to put up or shut up, the opportunity to produce a full, decent-quality novel (or draft of a novel) within a month. After all, nobody is demanding that work on a project cease simply because the month ran out. Some NaNoWriMo projects or WriMo's have been published, and if one has always wanted to accomplish the feat of writing a novel, what better time than an arbitrary date handed out by this contest?
Jesse Pohlman - Jesse Pohlman is an avid writer and a researcher of pretty much anything. His latest novel, Physics Incarnate, is available for Kindle.
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