Monday, October 25, 2010
NaNoWriMo 2010
I’ve been thinking for a while about whether I’m going to take part in this year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).
I really want to do it again. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed doing it last year. I had practically zero spare time, it was very very hard work some days, but dammit - I wrote a book! It was probably the most concentrated creative period of my life; I spent every day for whole month just creating characters, conversations, plots, mysteries and more, and writing about it all as fast as I could. It sounds totally ridiculous and clichéd, but your characters really do start to feel real to you. My head was constantly abuzz with ideas, and it felt good.
Why wouldn’t I want to do that again? I love making things, and to be honest I don’t do it anywhere near often enough. Sure, a bit of code here and there, some photography now and again, but largely I don’t have much of a creative output in my spare time. NaNo is exciting. It’s a monumental challenge. It’s fun. Every spare minute I could write, I’d work towards my daily word count - whether that was the morning, my lunch break, or the evening.
However, I think (and sure, there’s still time for me to change my mind completely) that I’m going to bow out this year, and hopefully have another go in 2011.
“Why?!” you ask, “That’s contrary to everything you’ve just explained to us over the last couple of paragraphs!”
Well, I see two main stumbling blocks to me doing NaNo this year:
I’m going to be starting a new job a couple of days before NaNo kicks off. I think it’s going to have a pretty steep learning curve, and I think it might be pushing it too much to essentially remove all of my spare time alongside learning new skills and a new job.
I can’t help being disappointed in myself at doing nothing with last year’s output. I beat the 50,000 word target last year, and got my first draft printed up into a proper book. But since then, it’s just sat on a bookshelf in our dining room, alone and unloved. A number of people have expressed an interest in reading what I wrote. To be honest, I’m not sure whether it’s good enough for others to read or not, or whether anyone would actually enjoy reading it, but it bugs me that I haven’t done anything else with it. Sure, the process of creating it was fun, but what’s the point, ultimately, if I’m the only one who’s ever going to see what I made?
Last year’s book needs a couple of rounds of editing before I could show it to a larger audience. The whole point of NaNo is you create a first draft; you just write and you don’t look back. You don’t have time to be critical of what you’re writing as you go along. As such, my book has a couple of plot devices and characters that vanish halfway through with no explanation (as I decided they were unnecessary, or didn’t know where to take them), and some of my writing is pretty craptacular in places.
So here’s what I’m thinking. Rather than spending a month working my fingers off writing another book that may also sit unread on a shelf, why not spend a month working at a slightly more leisurely pace focussed on editing last year’s book? If I work on it every day, I see no reason why I couldn’t get at least one round of editing done, and start to knock it into shape. I wouldn’t be under the same pressures as if I took part in NaNo proper (if I really needed a day off, I could take a day off), I’d be doing something creative, and I could start to move the book towards a place where other people can read it.
In fact, why not make it a goal to release the book for download from my website and the Kindle store at some point next year? I could also publish a paper version on Amazon via Lulu.com.
Overambitious? Possibly. But then, writing a first draft of a book in a month seemed pretty ambitious, and that went pretty well.
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