I was trying to figure out earlier this week when I first heard of NaNoWriMo. I distinctly remember trying to write a book in high school or college that was simply a disaster in every conceivable way. It was a fantasy book that involved a bunch of mutated hybrid children who could see an army marching toward their desert village and didn't know what to do - real compelling stuff. I thought it was a NaNo project, but NaNoWrimo, or National Novel Writing Month, was launched locally in San Francisco in 1999, and didn't really reach national prominence until 2002 or so.
If you haven't heard of it yet, NaNoWriMo is a self-directed project to write a short novel, or short novel equivalent, over the course of the month of November. The idea is that a standard short novel is around 50000 words (which, while short for a novel, is actually around the length of
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and just a hair under the current young adult standard), and that, by writing just under 1700 words a day, the goal is achievable. The project is about quantity over quality to start - the belief that the major roadblock to getting a novel completed is the feeling that a full-length novel is unattainable and that, too often, writers get bogged down in rewrites and minutiae too early in the process. So, instead of trying to make a final draft the first time through, blast through the blocks and just knock out as many words as you can. Worry about the plot and characters and details and continuity later.
This year was the fourth time I tried to make NaNoWriMo work for me. For as much as I read, I was not someone who was very successful at long-form fiction on my own. This year, though, something changed for me, and it actually worked out.
