NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, has been around since 1999. I probably became conscious of it about ten years ago, never giving it much thought except some curiosity about how it worked. This year I decided to give it a try.
In the middle of October I got an idea for a new novel, my agent was reading one I’d just revised, and the promos for NaNoWriMo were everywhere, a reminder that some people needed to get writing and others did not. I began dutifully on November 1, and now have 16,831 words. That’s not the number writers are expected to have if they’ve been keeping up with the daily quota of 1,667 for fourteen days. That would be a total of 23,338 words.
I confess to slacking. Sunday is usually a day off for me, and November 7, a Saturday, and the next day had me riveted to the news on both TV and cell. Monday was a return to normality, and I’ve had three very good days this week, with totals all over the official daily quota.
My daily quota is usually around fourteen hundred words, and sometimes a great deal lower. After I have a draft I do a lot of revising, mostly cutting and trimming and clarifying. Words disappear, clarity emerges, and I let the whole thing sit for a while.
I probably would not have made as much progress as I’ve to date if I hadn’t found a new idea for an entire story instead of a glimmer of a character in a scene. This story was so clearly shaped in my mind, with the rising and falling action, the total story arc, that I jotted down significant moments, turning points, and revelations until I had a page of eight fully realized paragraphs, which I turned into a nearly complete synopsis. Little details that usually emerge later popped up, and were jotted down. Once again, I mused on how different the beginning of this novel was from earlier ones.
NaNoWriMo offers an online community, which I brush up against occasionally, and will now use to post my moderate progress. If nothing else, it’s fun writing at a time when you know thousands of others are doing the same thing under the same umbrella. But I’m still taking Sundays off with little hope of making up the missing words later. That doesn’t matter. I’m almost one quarter the way into a new novel, and for once I have a pretty good idea where I’m going.
