No plot… big problem?
30 days... 50,000 words... how 'bout it?
NaNoWriMo, anyone?
Ah yes, it’s that time of year again: November. And what is so special about November, you ask? Thanksgiving? Pilgrims?
No, dear readers. Novels.
For those of you that aren’t complete nerds and don’t ask your sister to buy you books like this for your last birthday, November is National Novel Writing Month. Chris Baty founded the month-long book fest in 1999 while working as a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As he says in his book “No Plot? No problem! A low-stress, high-velocity guide to writing a novel in 30 days:”
“…I decided that what I really needed to do was write a novel in a month. Not because I had a great idea for a book. On the contrary, I had no ideas for a book.
All of this made perfect sense in 1999.”
It makes perfect sense to me, too. What I got out of the book was this: Lots of people say they want to write a book, myself included. But how many of us actually try it? My go-to excuse is, oh, I’ll write a book when I’m a little older and I’ve traveled the world and I have something really profound to say.
Allow me a moment to call BS on myself.
Hemingway didn’t become Hemingway over night. When he started, I mean really first started and picked up a pen or pencil or whatever for the very first time, he was just come clown wasting time not doing real work. And now he’s Hemingway.
And let’s face it, we’re not all going to be Hemingway, no matter how old or wise we get. If my future is chick lit, so be it. I’d be happy leaving the next great American novel to another.
The point is, you have to start somewhere. The first book you write won’t be brillant. But the goal is not brillance, it’s completion. I can say with certainty that once you start writing, and you catch that bug, you never stop writing. And the more you write, the better you get at it. So while your first 50,000 word (that was Baty and his SF pals’ minimum requirement for a “novel”) will probably be crap… maybe your fifth 50,000 words won’t be.
And why November? Well, why not? In 2000, Baty moved it from it’s original month of July to November to “more fully take advantage of the miserable weather.” But you can do it any month. I almost tried it last May but it didn’t pan out. (OK, OK, I chickened out. Sheesh.)
So now NaNoWriMo starts in two days, and even though I’ve got a major anthrolpology research project to do, other homework and reading, grad school applications to complete, essays to write for those applications, and The Spectrum owns my soul…
I kind of (really) want to give it a whirl. Am I crazy?
Probably.
