We have never fully understood why the fine folks at National Novel Writing Month chose November for their annual endurance test — clearly someone in charge didn’t fully study the complext negotiations and processes involved with preparing Thanksgiving dinner. After dealing with family issues, who has the energy to write 50,000 words in a single month?
Other than the thousands of NaNo participants, we mean.
So it’s not quite game on, but it’s game ready. Time to sign up, make your excuses, learn to work the crockpot (our helpful tip: put the plug thingy into a nearby outlet).
- National Novel Writing Month (this year with helpful podcasting technology)
4 responses so far ↓
C. Reese // Oct 6, 2005 at 11:34 am
While I agree that novel writing takes a great deal of time done right, it doesn’t always take years.
My experience is no doubt the exception to the rule, but consider this: I wrote, from scratch, a 75K word novel in 23 days, spending the grand sum total of about two hours a day at the keyboard. True, that was the rough draft. But for the most part it was a clean rough draft and did not take very much rewriting.
Ah, but was it a success? The jury is still out on that. It garnered a request from my top-choice editor, who read it in and within two months personally called me to ask for revisions and a resubmittal.
My latest completed MS took me two months to write.
My secret? I never sit down at the keyboard not knowing what I’m going to write. I think about my upcoming page quota (12-14 pp) while I’m away from the keyboard, and then I sit down to write it.
Sure, there are times when I have to scrap what I’ve written. But you can’t fix a blank page. And I’ve never bought a book yet that the first half was perfectly written and the second half was all blank pages.
Karen // Oct 7, 2005 at 4:36 pm
12-14 pps a day? That’s inhuman. But viva le difference. (Or is it “vive”? I can never remember.)
Diane // Oct 7, 2005 at 8:44 pm
I worried about the November thing last year too, but it turned out to work in my favor. “Nope, can’t do that family gathering, gotta go write. Can’t just hang out, gotta write.” If I wanted to make the NaNo deadline (for no better reason than thousands of other people were doing it at the same time), I had to focus and get the work done.
I loved it. I am SO looking forward to November. Something about doing it in a pack, I guess.
Bernita // Oct 9, 2005 at 6:19 am
Obviously geared towards Canadians. Our Thanksgiving is this weekend…