Archive for March 8th, 2008
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
The NaNoWriMo Incident.
Oh god.
The National Novel Writing Month incident. There have been pressing questions, and very few answers. A dark chapter in the Berenstain Bear book of my life. For those who don’t know, every November, the NaNoWriMo organization has a competition. It isn’t against anyone in particular, in fact it is more of a celebration of the act of writing. You have the month of November, to write a 50,000 word novel.
Well I think I’m pretty hot shit. So I sign up, I make the profile, have a pretty solid idea. November starts.
And I just start SUCKING with impunity. Oh sweet shit. Going into the month I felt like a hero. I had all the juice in the world to get this baby squeezed out, and plenty of stockpiled food stuffs to keep me from ranging too far from home base. But to quote my last girlfriend, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers”. But, in this case, it was days. The slipped sonny-jim, they slipped with impunity. (I plan to use that word like, 4 or 5 more times)
The fault? I thought about what I needed in order to write, WAY too much. The bottom line was that I didn’t just vomit out pages everyday. I tried to edit early, polish dialogue, basically committing atrocities left and right. Soon, the first days of December loomed closer…and I was nowhere near done. I had the last week of the month off, and as a broken hero, I wanted one last ditch power drive. I realized though, thankfully, that throwing away an entire week, sweating out pages like a turkish bath attendant, wasn’t going to be useful. It was a crunch for the sake of nothing, except an attempt to save my own Ego. A waste.
I plan to enter again next November. I really love the idea, and I love to write, so what better way to take years off one’s life, than to obsess about a novel for awhile. The only advice I can offer: Don’t Stop. Write mercilessly.
In all things.