NaNoWriMo - Do It!

I didn't expect to write anything here so soon, at least not until the end of the month, but I seem to have gotten myself wrapped into something insane and awesome, exciting and terrifying, and I thought all of my millions of billions of non-existent readers should try this too.

A friend of mine just introduced me to NaNoWriMo, which I had seen mentioned by some other friends of mine but had no idea what it was.  Basically, you write at least 50,000 words of a novel in the span of November 1st to November 30th, which comes out to around 1,667 words a day, or about 5 pages double-spaced I'd estimate, 2-3 single-spaced (if you're into that).  There isn't much of a catch - it can be any genre, including Novel-Poems, meta-fiction, and even fan-fiction, just as long as it's a novel.  You can plan it out before hand as much as you want, just as long as all the actual writing takes place in November.

Two friends and I talked about it, and we decided, yeah, why the fuck not!  The way we all figure, this will undoubtedly be a terrible, terrible first draft of things, but it'll be there to be edited or revised, probably rewritten in my case.  And if it sucks, hey, how many people can say they've written a novel!  I've actually been doing some planning for novels I figured I wouldn't do until far into the future, including some graphic novel ideas I have.  Maybe I'll use one of those, maybe some idea I haven't thought about for years, maybe something completely and utterly new I think up an hour before the clock strikes November.  It'll be a terrifying experience I'm sure - I tend to self-edit while writing, which I just won't be able to do if I hope to write 5 pages a day.  But it'll be a great experience too - one of the things that prevents us from writing, I think, is just a lack of motivation.  I could write an extra hour today, but I'll be able to write tomorrow too, so no big deal.  Except now, every day I don't write is another day I literally have to write more - shit's gonna be crazy man.

And I implore anyone and everyone to try it too!  Worst case scenario, you don't make it, but you try damn hard.  Personally, I don't think anything is lost by failing to make the 50,000 words.  A friend tells me that only one novel has been published out of all the ones written for this, and I'm probably going along genre-lines that'll make a publisher's head spin Exorcist-style, so seeing the story I wrote next month in a book jacket is not exactly one of my expectations in life.  So you really don't lose anything by trying, and you can only gain, even if you somehow only get 48,000 words, or some painful amount like that.  You've still got 48,000 words to edit into a novel!

I've actually been planning on writing one novel idea I've had, but that's not the novel I'm gonna write.  For one thing, I technically already started writing that, and for another thing, I feel like this is an opportunity to just kick back and let go - why do an idea I've been entertaining seriously when I can invent an idea as it goes along and see where it takes me!  It's been long time since I've written a complete mystery story.  In high school when I'd write, I'd start with a basic premise and just let things go from there.  Even now I hardly ever know the endings of my stories when I start writing.  It'll be a thrill to barely know the middle as well!

I'll still post something here at the end of October and November short story-wise, possibly with an excerpt of this "novel" if anything is reading-worthy, but definitely no guarantees on that.  The hardest part will definitely be writing consistently everyday, while also keeping up with school reading and assignments, and staying on top of short stories I have due for my Advanced Fiction class.  So I'll be writing a novel, a short story, and at least 2 presentations during November, not to mention reading out of Ulysses and reading a Virginia Woolf novel a week.  I might go insane.  But you gotta be a little insane to write a novel really, so why not give it a shot?  You can't even lose your sanity, I probably never even had it to begin with.