It’s that time of year again. Time to take a week off work, gather with compatriots, both virtual and local, for the most introverted kickoff party you can imagine, and fire the midnight starting gun on a 50,000-word sprint to December. This year is a bit different, however. Since I can’t get a break from personal, professional, or financial obligations, I won’t be hiding away at a resort with palm trees or a dangerous, all-inclusive food-and-drink package. On the bright side, I’ve somehow talked this whole experience up enough to persuade half my local writer group to take up the challenge with me, so… I suppose it’s a midnight kickoff at Studio B this year!
For the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenges writers to produce 50,000 words during the thirty days of November. That’s 1,667 words a day, including Thanksgiving, whether you have anything particularly interesting to say or not. No literary standards to uphold, no requirement that the resulting manuscript be remotely publishable, and no prizes worth mentioning. You win by writing fifty thousand words.
Now, participating will get you dirty looks and clutched pearls from one or more factions of the “cancel crowd” depending on the moniker you choose (NaNoWriMo, NaNo2, NovNov, Novelember, Novel Month, “The Word Challenge,” etc.), so feel free to use my prior argument as a means to stand up against self-righteousness, intolerance, and hate in a separate post. The point of this post is merely to say that the contest is a terrible way to write a novel, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. I’ve talked a lot about the benefits I get from doing this every year, but this year I thought I might discuss some of the contest’s downsides.
1667 words a day isn’t a problem. I used to do far more than that at work as an analyst. If you pick the words out the night before, that part takes about an hour and a half to two hours, including editing, and I can write 1667 words describing my lunch without even touching the elaborate backstory I invented for my waitress. So, for the past nine years (this being my tenth NaNo), I’ve taken on this challenge. I’ve always gotten better than the halfway point, and I’ve won four out of nine attempts. The problem is, while I’ve hit 50,000 words four times, only once did it turn into a complete zeroth draft of a novel by the end of the month. In reality, NaNoWriMo means I get a new half-written novel of 50,000 words or less added to my word-debt pile every December 1. I may finish it later in the year. I may abandon it and start a whole new separate novel in the summer. After ten years, I’m sitting on four fully drafted novels on one side of the desk, and this year I will start what will no doubt become a thirteenth unfinished book for the other side.
Let’s also add that while NaNoWriMo taught me good, consistent time management and writing habits, it taught me nothing about editing and quality control. In fact, it largely broke me of those ideas. It taught me to prioritize quantity over quality. It taught me to ignore my inner critic (that jerk holds me back most of the time). It taught me to write without knowing exactly where I was going, delegate all problems and issues to “future me,” and produce thousands of words I will eventually discard. Worst of all, it taught me to lower my standards. Set the bar so low I trip over it — not permanently, just until I have a first draft; then I have to raise it. Unfortunately, NaNo doesn’t show you how to do that either.
A popular notion, usually attributed to Malcolm Gladwell, is that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert at something. The research is more nuanced, but I like the idea of expertise as something you accumulate through persistence. I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent writing.
I do know that nine years of NaNoWriMo and my regular weekly writing and editing habit have produced 675,000 words across 16 projects. This doesn’t include 13 years as a technical and compliance writer. At my usual writing pace, I suspect, fiction-wise, I’m not even halfway to those mythical ten thousand hours, which means I have quite a bit more bad writing ahead of me before I can reasonably expect to become an expert. My NaNoWriMo record isn’t particularly impressive. Four wins in nine attempts? .444 is an impressive batting average, but it’s inconsistent when it comes to writing. I still have plenty to learn. I still have years of finishing, revising, and editing ahead, and I’m slowly refining my process to raise that batting average.
I don’t fail NaNo because I lack ideas, words, or the ability to type. I fail from distraction, burnout, and discouragement. I used to tell newbies the key to NaNo was just to keep typing, never look back, and never stop to think about whether what you’re writing is good until you hit 50,000. I’m going to actually retract a lot of that this year. Two of the ten people in my writing group run marathons for fun, and I think I might adopt something from that philosophy.
I generally tend to spend my NaNo vacation writing eight hours a day or so (usually drunk at a resort bar, hence the lack of actual output to show for it). As a result, I am well past halfway done by the end of the first week, so I feel justified in taking week two off. The problem is, I often forget, or don’t have the enthusiasm to come back and finish after that week. This year, I’m keeping a marathon pace of 1667 to 2000 words per day. If I still have the urge to keep typing, then I force myself to stop and hit the ground running tomorrow.
My second problem is that I plot everything out thoroughly, so there’s no ambiguity when it’s time to write. The problems arise when I get a little lax in the outline, usually in chapter-button scenes or elaborate action-and-drama scenes. The result is, I’m cruising along in “the flow,” typing my fingers off, and I come to the part of the outline that says “something cool happens to end the chapter on a cliffhanger,” or “protagonist escapes in some clever way,” or “antagonist says something really witty to win the argument.” Suddenly, I’m paralyzed for two days over what should literally be me writing those words into the text if I can’t think of a better placeholder. Instead, I stare at a blank page, then think about how bad this book is, then think about how I’m a crap human being whose parents never really liked him.
The inverse of this is the problem that I otherwise work from a very detailed outline with themes, ironies, symbolic statements, etc. Then, around the fourth place of constipating cheese and the third bottle of “really fresh wine” on Beaujolais Day (Thursday, November 19, 2026, Chatterbox Tavern, be there), when I am toasting Grandpa LaCout and celebrating my French ancestry, I think of a better theme, or a cooler third act. Yes! That’s the real story I’m telling, not this one! Unfortunately, it means going back over acts 1 and 2, studying them, modifying them, gutting them, and maybe expanding them. Well, damn, I don’t have time for that. I’ve only got 10 days left. What’s the point of writing the last third if it’s going to mess up the first two-thirds, and what’s the point of editing the first two-thirds now if it means I won’t finish NaNo? I might as well just abandon everything, let it all gestate for another month, and hit it fresh after New Year’s.
I am solving both problems by restructuring my outline into 30 scenes and writing one per day. I am not concerning myself with themes, intricate/interweaving plots, metaphors, ironies, etc. These are just 30 things I know will happen in the book. I know I’m going to rewrite them anyway, so let’s keep things to a minimum: write one per day, in any order, just to flesh out the feel and some of the dialogue. Between this, and the fact that I really want to see what my friends’ competing RoboCop/ALF fan fiction novels produce, I’m confident I will be victorious this NaNo with my long-awaited noir comedy Yakuza zombie farce.
If you are participating in NaNo, please consider getting a free TrackBear account and adding your name and word count to my leaderboard. If you’re in the Indy area, also consider joining our writer’s cult and dropping by one of our three weekly meetups.