National Novel Writing Month – November 1st-30th

There are three reasons.

1) If you don’t do it now, you probably never will. Novel writing is mostly a “one day” event. As in “One day, I’d like to write a novel.” Here’s the truth: 99% of us, if left to our own devices, would never make the time to write a novel. It’s just so far outside our normal lives that it constantly slips down to the bottom of our to-do lists. The structure of NaNoWriMo forces you to put away all those self-defeating worries and START. Once you have the first five chapters under your belt, the rest will come easily. Or painfully. But it will come. And you’ll have friends to help you see it through to 50k.

2) Aiming low is the best way to succeed. With entry-level novel writing, shooting for the moon is the surest way to get nowhere. With high expectations, everything you write will sound cheesy and awkward. Once you start evaluating your story in terms of word count, you take that pressure off yourself. And you’ll start surprising yourself with a great bit of dialogue here and a ingenious plot twist there. Characters will start doing things you never expected, taking the story places you’d never imagined. There will be much execrable prose, yes. But amidst the crap, there will be beauty. A lot of it.

3) Art for art’s sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and “must-dos” of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.

Besides support, you can upload your word count at the NaNoWriMo site and check the progress of others. There are web badges participants can post on their own site,  word count widgets, pep talk forums and more. I myself have never participated but I admire anyone who can devote themselves to writing with such reckless abandon.

I’ve been a fan of the daily word count off and on over the past few years. I used to shoot for 1,000 words a day, but I quickly realized sometimes it was a task just getting a handful of sentences down.  Some days were better than others, so I changed my style to a weekly goal instead which was usually two to five thousand.  I also like to record my word count on my desk calendar at least once a week just so I can look back on my accomplishments. In Stephen King’s On Writing, he suggests you should write 2,000 words a day and don’t get up from your desk until you’ve done it. This is the same author who advises you should not take longer than three months to write a first draft, meaning you could write four novels a year (one for each season).

Well, “NaNoWriMo-ites” aren’t listening to King in November!  Or are they? If you do the math, 50,000 words in 30 days is roughly 1,667 words a day (including Thanksgiving) so if you shoot for 2,000 per day you’ll actually reach 60,000 by the end of the month.  But that 3 month goal of King’s sounds so much better because when’s the last time you saw a King novel that was under 60,000 words?

All the numbers aside, LLBR salutes those who will be participating in this years venture.  And if you choose to later publish your work with CreateSpace, Lulu, Wordclay, or Outskirts, comes back and request a review from us and be sure to let us know your book was born in NaNoWriMo 2009!

Best of luck to those participating! May the best writer “pen!”