On NaNoWriMo: It's Fine For Some
OCTOBER TOTALS
Words: 34,048 (goal: 35,417)
2 projects (I am trying SO HARD to focus)
17 days written (way below goal of 23—I had freelance work that took me out of writing for about a week, but I was also just bad at writing this month)
YTD total: 353,009 (about 1k short of goal, but generally on pace for 425k goal)
I wanted to take my fantasy novel and redraft it for NaNoWriMo this month. Instead I'm prioritizing finishing a romance novel that I've spent the last eight months (too long) on. I'm hoping to still get to the fantasy in the evenings, but my goal is absolutely not to get 50k on it. (These are the two projects I worked on in October as well.) My general writing goal currently is to learn how to redraft better in general, which was why I hatched the NaNo plan in the first place: I really want to redraft this right the first time. Instead the romance is also serving that purpose. C'est la vie. (I have a couple posts planned for the end of the month that discuss drafting, so I'll let you know how it went.)
NaNoWriMo is a good writing challenge for some, but I think it's most useful for writers who (a) actively want to first-draft something only and (b) actually know how to first-draft. Its wordcount-oriented culture is part of the reason my own process broke years ago; I’ve been doing NaNo on and off for 15 years. It's not really the challenge’s fault that it made me think the best marker of success is how many words you wrote; that’s on me. But beginning writers trying to figure out what craft is may not be served by the wordcount-oriented focus in general.
I do see a recent shift in the conversation around NaNo, and I'm glad to see it. I think that's needed and overdue. Challenges like NaNo are less helpful for folks like me in general, who churn out a lot of words on the regular and usually have multiple projects going in various states of completion. I don't think first drafting is the most important part of writing; revision is what makes a book whole. I'm only focusing so much on drafting at this point in my process because I got way overzealous with revision and never have a finished draft to fully revise.
This is how I write, as well. With my tea SO close to my computer. I hold a book in case I need to protect my computer, from the tea.
NaNo’s emphasis on YOU CAN WRITE A BOOK RIGHT NOW can feel odd if most of the quality of the work is something you, like me, put in after the fact. In general I think we should take 3-4 months AT LEAST to write a book, and that’s speaking from bizarro world where this is where I spend most of my time. I have written faster than that and it has generally harmed either me or my product, or both. Periods of reflection serve both plot and pacing.
All this to say: you can start a book in 30 days, yes. But there’s still generally months of work to be done after, and part of me wishes this holistic concept appeared more often in the literature.
My approach to writing is much more oriented around long-term goals: yearly word targets, then split monthly, then weekly (this is the least important of the four, and I often don’t check in with them), and finally daily. It is completely fine not to hit my nominal target of 1,500 words a day / 9k a week; I miss it all the time. It is a slightly bigger deal not to hit my ~35k a month, though. It suggests my work habits and patterns aren’t working for me and that something in my approach to the work needs to change.
It’s this seemingly narrow approach that gets me about NaNo, though I understand this is just one culture and that I don’t need to subscribe to it. I know NaNo is generally an effort to build writing communities, counteract the doldrums of November, and maybe give people who don’t love the holiday season something self-sustaining to think about while they endure it. I love that. None of these goals are impeachable. I am aware that I’m holding up an apple and asking why it is not a kumquat. And I am participating in NaNo this year anyway, even if only to push myself just that little bit harder to get this goddamn book out the door.
That’s all it’s become: a reason to gather a community of similarly struggling writers around me for one month, since most of the time I usually feel like I’m slogging alone. And if that’s all I take away from it, that’s no so bad. I like the spirit of NaNoWriMo more than I like the letter of it. May the grace of writing be with you this month.
On that note, I started a writing Discord! The purpose of this place is to connect fledgling but somewhat purposeful writers—mostly folks who are trying to break into self-publishing or traditional publishing in the next 2-10 years, but a few of us are just regular hobbyists who like to chat craft. Many of us, in spite of the above, are also doing NaNoWriMo and regular sprints. If you’re looking for a smaller community to hang out with, there are about 15 people in there right now—we’re friendly, we’re queer, come on in! (Bear in mind this link expires after 24 hours—please contact me if you’d like another.)
You can also add me on the NaNoWriMo website, if so inclined.
OCTOBER MEDIA ROUNDUP
Here’s some of what shaped me in October:
BOOKS
SWORD OF DESTINY, Andrzej Sapkowski (Witcher 0.75) (3.5)
MEDIOCRE: THE DANGEROUS LEGACY OF WHITE MALE AMERICA—Ijeoma Oluo (4.25)
HEARTBREAK BAY—Rachel Caine (3.5)
DETRANSITION, BABY—Torrey Peters (4.25)
IT TAKES TWO TO TUMBLE—Cat Sebastian (4.25)
A GENTLEMAN NEVER KEEPS SCORE—Cat Sebastian (3.5)
TELEVISION
Umbrella Academy
Over the Garden Wall (rewatch; CLASSIC hero’s journey, you love to see it)
MOVIES
Enola Holmes (2020)—2.5 (Helena Bonham Carter’s Guy Fawkes plot was tragically underdeveloped)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)—3.5
The Lincoln Lawyer (2011)—3.5
Sense and Sensibility (1995)—3.5 (WHY did kate winslet MELT in the RAIN)
Event Horizon (1997)—1.5*
I kinda still want to talk about Event Horizon. I listened to a podcast (locked behind a Patreon paywall so I’m being vague) where a horror author (Jonny Sims) tried to argue that the genre and location are often conceptually confused. Science fiction, he argued, is a location. This is to me false, and it’s why this movie is mistakenly categorized as science fiction when it’s not. AT MOST it is “space horror,” and even then, they changed two words and one thing about the setting to make it space. But it’s not about space? It didn’t deal with the horrors of space, it dealt with the horrors of Earth, in space for some reason? I’m furious about this movie and it’s been days. It’s like if you retold Titanic in a sword and shield universe—it doesn’t change that it’s just Titanic. This is a horror movie that was placed somewhere else. What an absolute waste. How dare you. Resident Evil man, explain yourself.
Anyway. [clears throat] You’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER—let’s put something (anything!) on the page.