Nanowrimopromo

Somehow we have arrived at Thursday without my noticing. I have been head-down all week working furiously on the book (and making good progress, thank goodness, as you can see by my handy word-count-o-matic), and the days have gone past in a sort of blur.

I have a project in mind for Nanowrimo (although we all know how well that worked out last year), and I'm really excited about it. Seductive New Ideas are always dangerous for a writer. When you're at a painful stage with your work-in-progress, it can be very tempting to 'just make a start' on your SNI. Before you know it, you are completely sucked in and conducting a mad affair with the new book while your poor little current book sits at home wondering why you haven't called and whether that was lipstick it saw on your collar. That is why I really want to have my first draft completely wrapped up by the end of October. Taking a month off to work on something new will be such a relief, and will help me approach the Ferocious Edit (which is December's job) with fresh eyes.

For those of you who haven't taken part in Nanowrimo before, here's the deal (from the official website):

"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 painstaking 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.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."

I've participated in Nanowrimo twice before, and I have some possibly sage advice:
1) Pace yourself. Last year I decided I was going to write the 50,000 words in two weeks. I did it, but then got horribly ill and exhausted. One of Nanowrimo's many benefits is that it prepares you for a steady, productive writing life, and reinforces the fact that doing some writing every day will eventually produce a novel.
2) This goes hand-in-hand with the point above: pace yourself, yes, but keep to your daily quota. If you let it slide, telling yourself that you will catch up, it gets harder and harder. If you know you have a couple of busy days coming up when you won't be able to write, get an extra few thousand words under your belt beforehand.
3) Finish the whole story in November, even if it means you have to under-write and sketch out scenes rather than write them in full. I got about halfway through last year, and then dropped the story where it stood when I reached 50,000 words. I went on to re-write my previous novel and didn't come back to the Nanowrimo novel until about April or May this year (the Nanowrimo novel is the one I'm still working on now). All that time, the Nanowrimo novel had been drifting aimlessly, getting in with a bad crowd and possibly taking some drugs. When I came back to it, it took ages for me to make friends with it again. So I speak from experience when I say: finish the damn thing in November, no matter how bad the first draft is. You can improve it and flesh it out later.
4)Announce that you are taking part to as many people as possible, to make it very embarrassing if you give up. This will keep you on track.

Speaking of which: I thought I might write a weekly post throughout Nanowrimo where I chronicle my own progress and link to posts from those of my readers who are also taking part. Keep this in mind for November, if you're interested: I'll put up an official sign-up sheet towards the end of the month and publish a list of the participants in our group on the first day of November. It is always more fun doing it in a gang and discussing our experience along the way! It helps to keep one's Nanowrimo-mojo up too.