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Kamikaze Novel Writing
spotmonk writes "November is National Novel Writing Month, and the beginning of this year's nanowrimo program will be starting on Nov 1st. Participants will write a novel of a minimum of 50,000 words in a month's time. Described as valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, nanowrimo takes a kamikaze approach to writing a novel - you may not get the best novel out of it, but at least you've written a novel. Sign-ups last till the end of the month."
It's just a way to make us write something, no matter how horrible, in order to have a story that we can edit and improve on after November's over.
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There are hack writers and there are blocked writers, but there are no hack blocked writers... :-)
Many good writers have the skills to write well, it's the writing fast which confounds them.
My wife is a writer and she summarizes succinctly: "It's easier to fix crap than air".
Nanowrimo does many would-be writers a service: permission to write lots of crap and then spend the next 11 months fixing it.
I'm finally going to get that story together next month. It might not be 50,000 words, but it'll be better than nothing.
My father is a blogger.
Also, it's not as easy as it seems, especially when you miss days due to unforeseen circumstances.
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It's kind of like parenthood: QUANTITY TIME is far, far better than QUALITY TIME.
A lot of people tell themselves that they're good parents, but never spend any time with their kids.
A lot of people tell themselves that they could write a great novel, but have never actually done it. I think this is a great idea, and if it weren't for the fact that November is the Absolute Worst Month at my job, I would be participating for sure. As it stands, I'm still thinking about participating.
Go pee on someone else's parade, orpx.
Education is the silver bullet.
>> On the other hand, if 'right' means writing 50k words in such a way that it tells a well thought out, compelling, and interesting story to not only the author but to the reader as well, then that is much more of an undertaking.
... and they don't write a freling thing. In that case, you're left with ideas in your head, and maybe a stack of notebooks from 'universe building' sessions at coffee shops ... and no fiction.
... but to get a participant writing SOMETHING. Even if it's complete dreck. That's the same advice that published authors and writing seminar teachers give -- get in the habit of writng *something* every day. 100% guarantee that most of it will be crap. However, there will be gems hidden in the crap, that you pull out and polish.
... maybe even print it out doublesided and let it sit on the shelf so they can point to it and say "See? My novel!"
... instead of a bunch of ideas that "aren't quite right", and writer's block inspired dents in the monitor from when you've driven your skull into it repeatedly.
Quite a few people (me included) spend so much time angsting over getting the plotline "just right" and all the various interconnecting subplots to "mesh perfectly" and/or throwing away plot ideas because they're not the gold-plated shining storyline
The goal with NANO is not to shoot for mediocrity
The mediocre participants can reach the 50K mark at the end of November, call their novel finished
The real authors in the crowd will know they've written dreck that will need serious re-writes. If they lack motivation to do *that*, 'NANOEDMO' (editing month) is a few months later. There's a good chance that 90% of the mediocre crap they churned out in November will be thrown out-- leaving 10% to recraft into a new story.
But at least they have the 10% out there to work with
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This mind intentionally left blank.
It's kind of like parenthood: QUANTITY TIME is far, far better than QUALITY TIME.
Are you serious? Yes, I guess you are. You filibuster the kid into being hopeless with massive ammounts of 'quanitity' time. Rather than providing the quality time that can help them reach their own level of qualitive quantity, without being badgered by an over-opinionated, lost, parent, BUT HEY THEY ARE SPENDING MASSIVE AMMOUNTS OF POINTLESS TIME WITH THEM.
Alot of people tell themselves they can write a great novel. Then they write one, and it's not so great. And it's not so great because they cannot express themselves in the way they should. Little do they know, their idea is the greatest idea ever, with only infinity as it's limit. But they are severly limited by outside sources, aka people who want to waste time with QUANITITY, rather than quality.
Your job sounds like alot of quantity time, rather than spending your 'quality' time, writing november's competition.
Point is, I only Pee on parades, parading the inevitably pointless stupid time wasting projects humans spend their time on that in the long run only cause MORE HARM.
I'm a published novelist (Star Dragon, Tor, and my second one will be out in early 2006). I sold the second one, Spider Star, under contract and had a deadline to meet. I spent several months working on background and other research, started writing the draft last February, and finished in July. Because of teaching, I'd only hit about 50k words by the end of May and wrote about 50k words in the following six weeks. It's a harsh effort. Burnout is possible. Revisions will be super necessary, and extensive. If you haven't spent a lot of time doing research in advance, you're likely to make big mistakes somewhere. There are some fast-writing professionals out there. You've heard the stories, many true, about cranking out a book in a week. They don't put their own names on those. Those writers still say they need a few months, WORKING FULL TIME, to write a good book. I'm just a little worried that people will write bad books, get burned out, and fail at their dreams by this approach. The sense of community can help, but this smacks more of a stunt than a serious professional effort. If you need stunts to write, maybe you're not a writer. If it's just a fun thing to try, fine, but think hard about your goals and the relationship with your writing before attempting this.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Wow, I didn't realize what an asshole you are, or I wouldn't have bothered responding to you.
Parents need to spend time with their kids. A parent who uses the logic, "Well, we went fishing last year" is an idiot. Parents should be making time to be near their kids, so they can be around when the kid needs them. A child doesn't know how to ask for help - it takes an observant parent to notice when a child has problems. Maybe you were talking about teenagers. A 5-year-old doesn't resent their parent's time, as long as they're given their own room and time and space as well.
The vast majority of aspiring authors never write a single novel. So, I disagree with your assertion that "they write one, and it's not so great."
This is a voluntary, fun idea for people who probably have NOT already written that first idea as you describe.
You've never had a deadline at work? Your job must be pretty menial - the kind that robots will be doing some day.
It doesn't cause harm to encourage people to be creative. Someone who thinks this way clearly has no creativity.
I think you need a Time Out.
Education is the silver bullet.
It hardly seems like a difficult task to me, provided you've got the motivation to sink your soul into such a work.
What makes you think sinking your soul into something is easy? And why do you think writing is easy? Writing fiction is not the same thing as writing a slashdot post. If it is, you're probably not doing one of them right.
A lot of people think that writing is easy. After all, everyone can write down words and sentences. It's a highly skilled art form and it takes years to get good at it, the same way it takes years to get good at any highly skilled activity. I wrote hundreds of thousands of fiction before I tackled novels. I wrote many short stories, even sold a few. I collected at least a couple of hundred rejection slips. It isn't easy, and the competition is fierce.
Please, feel free to prove me wrong and write a decent to good novelette next month. There are rare writers who are good right away, and while there are already too many writers vying for the available publishing slots, there's always room for good writers.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
All I can say is I learned more from writing 57,000 words in a month last year (actually, 94,000 in two months, since I didn't stop) than I learned in over ten years of writing short stories.
You don't learn much about scenes from writing short stories. You don't learn much about gradual character development, or long-term plot arcs, or pacing of subplots. Short stories can teach you basic skills of writing description and good sentences, but so can essays and writing exercises.
More importantly, they require different skills. They require a concise idea and usually a single plotline. They require a certain style of presenting and dealing with characters that doesn't apply to longer works.
Some people seem to be natural short story writers, some natural novelists. Some people can easily handle both. The problem is with the people who are natural novelists: excellent at long plots, large casts, and gradual character developments, but no good at handling the short-story format. They're told repeatedly that they have to do stories before they can do novels, and they end up never trying novels because they haven't had success with short stories. This is the sort of person who is an excellent candidate for NaNoWriMo.
What I discovered last year was that for me, novels are easy, breathtakingly easy, compared to short stories. I could write a single novel in the time it took me to develop one or two painful and difficult short stories. And it was fun and fascinating, and the writing got markedly better as I went on. (Though it wasn't much to brag about before the second edit.) Apparently, I'm not much of a concise-idea person, but I do well with a long, complicated plot structure.
If short stories helped you, then great. But don't assume that it works the same way for everyone. Many people spend years hearing the myth that you must learn short stories first, and never get a chance to develop their real skills with novels.
Slash has nothing to do with Slashdot.
I just see a lot of beginners tackling novels before they have the skills to do it, and getting so wrapped up in their baby that it's devestating when they can't sell it.
That's the beauty of NaNoWriMo. It's so ridiculous, so high-spirited, so much pure fun, that no one expects their novels to be great literary works of art. They're not paralyzed by the fear that they'll write 50,000 words of crap, because they expect to write 50,000 words of crap. Instead of spending years struggling to write the Great American Novel and then being devastated when that first effort doesn't sell, they can write 50,000 words of something they enjoy for pure fun, and learn something in the process. And they don't have to invest years of struggle into it.
For a few people (myself included), that first hectic effort is a very rough draft that later gets ripped apart - I literally cut and reworked 40,000 words in my first edit alone - and polished several times for eventual submission to publishers. In those cases, we're still talking about a significant time investment and a serious project. For other people, it's just fun, a way to see if they can do it.
I haven't yet seen anyone on NaNo who considered their unedited NaNo effort to be a work of genius or who was disappointed about seeing it rejected. And at the rate of one NaNo a year, a writer would likely have at least two books completed before getting the first one rejected, so there's unlikely to be the same element of "I can't believe they rejected my baby" in the process.
You say that the idea of writing a novel before you were ready was psychologically daunting. The whole point of NaNo is to make the process less psychologically daunting. Isn't that a good thing?
Slash has nothing to do with Slashdot.
And where on earth did you get these definitions? At any rate, they certainly aren't universal.