Dragaera

Nanowrimo 2003 (why didn't somebody tell me!)

Mon Nov 10 10:07:51 PST 2003

http://www.nanowrimo.org/index.php

There is apparently a contest going on here in November that is right down 
my alley:

"National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel 
writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 
175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a 
novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing 
a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in 
NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze 
approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the 
fly."

The good news is that I could use something like this to jump-start my 
writing. The bad news is that it's already November 10th! It appears that 
writing 2400 words per day for the next 21 days will *just* put me over, but 
can I find the time to invent something in 21 days?

I'm thinking of taking a very raw shot at the Aerie work for this contest 
and then cleaning it up. Perhaps I'll try my hand at a prequel or something.

Here are the main elements:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time.

Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as 
well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era's 
most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. 
To be able to make obscure references to passages from your novel at 
parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far 
longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: Writing begins November 1, 2003. To be added to the official list of 
winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. 
Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word 
counters, the partying begins.

I'm pretty sure I can write 2400 words of crap per day - I'm just not sure I 
*want* to.

So, is anyone else "in"?

johne (phy) cook
wisconsin, usa

personal blog: http://breezeway.blogspot.com
aerie blog: http://aeriepress.blogspot.com/
stormfort list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stormfort/

"There are only three rules to writing a novel; unfortunately, no one knows
what they are."
				--Somerset Maugham


(Here's another article with a little more information: 
http://houstonpress.com/issues/2003-10-30/calendar3.html/1/index.html
<http://houstonpress.com/issues/2003-10-30/calendar3.html/1/index.html>


Roughing It


Cancel all your plans this month; you've got a novel to write


BY KEITH PLOCEK
"The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really 
shitty first drafts." -- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird


For many would-be literary types, writing a novel is a one-day endeavor, as 
in "One day, I'm going to write a novel." Most people never get around to 
it, or they become incredibly frustrated once they begin. "You feel like you 
need to live up to all your fiction-writing heroes. It never does, but the 
thing you read that so inspired you also sucked really badly when they first 
wrote it," says Chris Baty, the founder of an ingenious enterprise designed 
to help writers overcome the potentially crippling fear of a shitty first 
draft.

Four years ago, Baty founded National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a 
time for the budding novelist in all of us to spew forth pages upon pages of 
really sloppy prose. "It appeals to people who don't see themselves as 
writers, who are kind of a little intimidated by the idea of serious 
writing," he says.

Here's the deal: Participants must write a 50,000-word novel during the 
month of November. That's 1,667 freakin' words a day. Word counts are 
determined by an online computer that couldn't care less how good, bad or 
ugly each work is. Quantity trumps quality in NaNoWriMo. It's the literary 
equivalent of mining with dynamite; these novelists blow up an entire 
mountain in search of a few nuggets of pure gold. And an adventure. "It's 
fun to pretend you're a novelist," says Baty. "It's like being a kid again, 
where you got to be the crazy BMX hero or the spaceship captain or whatever. 
As adults, we don't get to do that enough."

Thanks to online message boards, participants have the comfort of knowing 
they're not alone in their maniacal missions. The boards are a place where 
harried writers can find support, as well as inspiration, through friendly 
competition. "Every morning you're running through the list of people you 
know and trying to find out how far they got the night before," says 
Jennifer Bryant, the head of the Houston chapter of NaNoWriMo.

"If you're focusing so much on beating someone, you're not worrying about 
the fact that what you're writing is crap," adds Rebecca Elsenheimer, one of 
Bryant's amicable competitors.

The message boards are also full of novelists' wacky challenges to each 
other. "Last year, I had to insert a drunken grandma at Thanksgiving dinner 
singing 'Kum Ba Yuck' instead of 'Kum Ba Yah.' It worked out very nicely to 
the point that if I do try to get it published, I'm leaving it in," boasts 
Bryant.

So what kind of frantic novels are people churning out? "You've got 
everybody doing everything. The nice part about it is that there are no set 
rules about what you have to do," Bryant says.

Like many of the participants, Baty finds the desire to create a rough 
masterpiece much greater than the urge to polish it. "I find revising novels 
to be one of the hugest, most painful, hurts-your-brain-in-really-bad-ways
processes," he says. "You've created this Byzantine world and suddenly you 
have to perform microsurgery on it. It's too bad, because all the novels 
that we've read that have just completely blown our minds have just been 
revised and revised."

No worries: There's always National Novel Editing Month in March.

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