NaNoWriMo (beep beep-pah beep beep)

It's that time of year: not the holidays, but the push to write a novel in a month. November is National Novel Writing Month (a/k/a NaNoWriMo). The idea to to knock out 50,000 words (which amounts to a short novel) in one month. Of course, that's a pretty high word count in a quick period, so it's unlikely that the novel you write will be ready-to-go on December 1. In fact, if you go to their website, they make it quite clear that what you will be write will need revision and this is just a start. The idea is to push yourself to write.

In case the task wasn't intimidating enough, a few days ago, there was a piece in Salon urging people to not do NaNoWriMo. The author of the article argued that there were enough bad books out there and that people should stop writing and start reading. (Her evidence that writers don't read was really just "I was talking to a guy at a party...") She brought up a lot of other reasons to not do it, and, needless to say, the defenders of NaNoWriMo came out in full force. Which made me start to think about why I did it and how it affected me.

You may remember that I took this on last year. As I'd written virtually no fiction in my life, I figured what better way to dip my toe in the pool than to cough up 50,000 words in a month? At the time I thought it was crazy (and it was), but it was really a good thing for me to do. When you have to generate about 2000 words a day, you can't waste time mulling over whether or not the words you are writing are "worthy." You write and write. The edit button has to be off. This freed me up to let go of any inhibitions I was having about writing fiction.

At the end of the month, I'd done it. I was sitting on over 50,000 words, a good start to a novel. But, truly, I needed to not see it anymore. I put it away and, until recently, had done very little with it, and without enthusiasm. This was fine; I had other bits of writing to take care of, and this would be there when I was ready. A couple of months ago, I was finally brave enough to seriously look at what I had written last November, and it wasn't half bad. Since then, I've done some shifts to the story, I've made a lot (a lot) of edits, although surprisingly, not as many (or as deep) as I anticipated. (Although I haven't gotten into the end-of-November writing from last year. Keep your fingers crossed that I wasn't completely insane by that time.)

The point is that without NaNoWriMo, I may have given up on the story or stopped at 10,000 words or flitted to another project. Before last November, I looked at my writing as a hobby, as something I was dabbling in. Sure, I had a blog and a few ideas for stories I might write some day, but this was just spare-time stuff. NaNoWriMo told me to keep pressing on, to not be afraid of that silly idea in my head because, if nothing else, I need the wordcount. Now, I have a book. I wrote a book! Not a long book and (at this point) not a finished book, but it's there. A book. And now I have to say, yes, I am a writer.