Every so often someone says something, or explains something, in such a way that it just ‘hits the spot’. This week that very thing happened in an email sent to a writers group I belong to, and I just had to ask permission to reproduce it here. If you’ve ever wondered what on earth NaNoWriMo is all about, this is it.
Without further ado, and with big thanks, I hand the stage over to Jenn, and her brilliant Silent Voices…
*****
I’ve done NaNo for several years now. I absolutely love it. It isn’t about the words you upload. It’s about you and you alone. 50K words in 30 days (especially since American Thanksgiving falls in there) is a brutal pace. It’s exhilarating though and one heck of a ride if you can stick it out. For those writers who make it all the way to November 30th at 11:59:59pm, regardless of whether you made the 50K mark, there is a tremendous sense of accomplishment – and rightfully (write fully?) so. The only people I know who can ordinarily write 50,000 words in 30 days are those who can dedicate their full attention to writing and I would wager that many (if not most) of those professional writers don’t turn out that many fiction words in a month either.
The first year I started, I was asking the same questions you did. Why should I bother? Why should I stick to these weird rules? What’s in it for me? The person who got me into it told me this:
The hardest novel to publish is the one you never wrote.
The world is FULL of people are “going to write a novel some day” or who “are writing a novel but it isn’t finished”. NaNo makes you get the words onto the paper. And if the words are of a hideous quality, THEY HAVE STILL BEEN WRITTEN and you can go back and make it readable. But if you never get the novel down, you can never polish it.
People tend to do NaNoWriMo for any (or all) of 3 reasons: thrill seeking (it really is quite a rush to get caught up in the NaNo spirit), to finally get that novel out of your head and onto the paper (even if it sucks, it’s a start that I didn’t have before), and/or the social aspect (knowing that you are part of close to 200,000 writers all working on the same goals at the same time, plus all of the ways to connect with others doing NaNo).
There’s no point in cheating because it doesn’t serve any purpose. You don’t win in relation to other writers; you win a competition against yourself and your inner editor. It isn’t for critique unless you form a little band of people and read/crit each others’ novels after NaNo is over. It isn’t about what people think of you if you win (or lose or quit); it’s about you pushing yourself all the way to (and sometimes beyond) your own limits and your own standards.
NaNoWriMo is a rush and it’s quite a roller coaster ride. I’ve never made it to 50K. In my own mind, I’ve “won” once because that year, I didn’t quit. Even though my word count was a paltry 23K, I didn’t give up. For myself, I won. And I am the only person that I need to prove anything to in regards to NaNo.
I hope every writer at some time is able to experience the rush that I get from NaNo. It’s the same feeling that you get after you really get into “the zone” while writing and words fly as fast as the mind can keep up and you make major progress on your story/novel/writing and when you look back on what you wrote, you are proud of it. For me, it is an entire month of days like that. I write ONLY because I enjoy it. So NaNo, because I enjoy it, fits right in with my goals…
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