I’ve entered and “won” three of the past four years of NaNoWriMo. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a month-long event held each November in which you have to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Quality doesn’t matter. There’s no time for editing. The very important point of the exercise is to put your butt in the seat and just write. There tends to be an extraordinary amount of caffeine involved, and quite a lot of panic around week 2 when your initial enthusiasm has worn off and you’re left with a very large word count to meet before November 30.
So here I am, with three “novels” tucked away in a drawer (or in my case, on a jump drive). They’re not good. They’ve never been edited. In fact, in two out of the three, there really wasn’t anything more than a vague glimmer of a plot to start with. While they may not be good, they’re a surprising testament to how much can be accomplished in such a short period of time, and how much life the characters take on. They’re also a reminder of why I don’t make a living as a fiction writer.
This year is different than the rest. This year — much to my surprise — I have a plot. I have characters. I’ve spent the last six months talking through scenes in my head. This should be a good thing, right? And yet, I’m not so sure. I feel a strange sort of commitment to this project, and there’s something strangely paralyzing about the thought of this really great story getting away from me. What if it goes nowhere? What if it doesn’t go where I think it goes? Those of you who don’t write won’t understand that last comment, but I swear to you, characters have a habit of rising up out of your rough framework and doing things that you don’t expect. And yet, it seems to me that the things that they end up doing are truer to their characters than what I expected of them. It’s a phenomenon that blows my mind every time it happens.
I realize that the only way to really make a go of this, the only way to do this story any justice, is to plan to take some time off early in November, hunker down and just immerse myself in the project. I can’t shortchange this one and just pound out some words in between other projects or after everyone else has gone to bed. I want to give it proper attention. I can only hope that on November 30 I can look back and realize that I’ve created something good. It doesn’t have to be at the level of the 100 greatest books in American literature, just good enough for me to look back on it with pride and say, “Hey, I wrote that.”