NaNoWriMo Final Thoughts

Now that I’m done and I can spare a few hundred words for my blog, I’d thought I’d give a little recap on what I think this NaNoWriMo thing was good for, despite some asinine anal-retentive elitist asshat skeptics out there:

First, what lessons this provides a newbie author:

1. The first rule of writing: to be a writer one has to write. This is not planning to write. Not talking about writing. Not regaling forums on teh interwebz about what you’re writing. Not reading books or blog posts about writing. Not doing research, making character sketches, color-coding your filing system, or playing with Google street view to find the perfect house for your kick-ass heroine. This is butt-in-chair putting-words-down-in-proper-order-writing. It is the only essential task, and if you came up against NaNoWriMo and it kicked your ass even though you spent every day on the forums on their site talking about what a tough time you were having, you need to keep reading this paragraph until you realize where you went wrong.
2. The second rule of writing: to be a writer one has to continue writing. In other words, novels are long, and require a certain amount of discipline to even attempt, much less finish. Waiting for the muse to strike is all well and good, but if you don’t learn to keep at a project every day until it’s finished, you will end up with a lot of first chapters, but precious few first drafts.
3. The importance of being able to kick the internal editor off the bus for the duration. To write at a professional level, editing and polishing your prose is an essential step, but you need to train yourself not to mix revision with writing. They are two different animals, and if the editor is driving when you’re trying to get a draft done, you risk getting caught in an infinite loop of write, go back and fix what you just wrote, write more, go back and fix everything to that point, repeat. . . until you have a wonderfully shiny first chapter, but again, no first draft. This isn’t to say you cant revise something that’s in process (sometimes you have to) but you put down the writing hat and pick up the editing hat. And if you find yourself doing that switch off more than a couple times during a single project you may want to reconsider how you’re going about that project. (Maybe you need a little outlining, some continuity notes, or a higher threshold for clunky prose in a first draft.)
4. For those that completed the task, it gives a realistic understanding of just how much work this actually is. All this effort and you have 50K of first draft that most likely is not even a complete novel. If you accomplish this— or even a substantial portion of it— and you’re still excited about what you’re doing, you may just be cut out for this writing thing.

What I, the established pro, got out of it:

1. A demonstration that I could do it, which was not as much a given as it might appear. Prolific I might be, but that’s because I write steadily, not because I write quickly. I normally do something like 600 – 1000 words a day, this required me to double my regular productivity for a month. (Thus the virtual shutdown of my blog.)
2. A demonstration that I could do this without any prep work. Almost everything else I’ve written has had months, if not years, of fermenting ideas before I set first word to page. The two exceptions are notable for being the two other novels where I also approached this kind of productivity for an extended period. (TeeK and Wolfbreed for the curious.) This time round I made a conscious decision to do this with an idea I had driving home from WFC the day before NaMoWriMo started. This suggests I may be able to force my Muse into slave-driver mode. Good to know.
3. I got the raw material for a brand new novel, which may help me eat at some point in the future. This is a good thing.