NaNoWriMo redux…
I’ve dissed NaNoWriMo aka “National Novel Writing Month” before. Let’s forget about the poor choice of November for this annual writing frenzy. (Thanksgiving in the US is a major travel holiday that can take out a big chunk of writing time!) That’s not an important criticism. (For all I know, authors take advantage of holidays to write, especially if they otherwise have demanding day-jobs.) No, my main criticism is that no one should write a novel in a month! Or even think they can.
So…you’re not one-third of the way through the month. Have you finished one-third of your great American novel? Maybe you have sixty thousand words in an MS Word file and even an outline for everything, but in the twenty day left, it’s almost impossible for you to turn even that into a novel. NaNoWriMo is a sprint, while writing a novel is a marathon. You’re winded now? You have seventeen or eighteen miles to go!
Having written a few novels, I have a large statistical sample that I can extrapolate to say, “The odds are against you.” I’ve never written a novel in a month. I’m lucky to finish a short fiction piece in a month! I don’t want to discourage writers or dampen their enthusiasm—after all, I’m an avid reader who’s always looking for a good story—but steady writing a bit each day over months or years is much better praxis than fits and starts for a writing project. Authors are the captains of their writing voyages, and “steady as she goes” is always better advice for a captain to follow than “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” The latter is likely to end in a shipwreck, and the author can go down with the ship.
I have speedily written a few novels. The Midas Bomb‘s words just spewed, page after page; The Secret Lab‘s prose went quickly too. Maybe that was because The Midas Bomb was my first mystery/thriller and I had two new characters, a crime-fighting duo, to spur my interest; and The Secret Lab was my very first YA novel with a lovable mutant cat as a main character. But that speed had consequences: The Midas Bomb required a second edition to make it better and align it with other books in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” series; and The Secret Lab also had a second edition, a bit of makeover by A. B. Carolan to prepare for more YA sci-fi mysteries to follow.
Mind you, the first two editions of those novels were good, modesty aside, but the speed in writing and publishing the first editions left me dissatisfied. And, even with that speedy writing, I didn’t finish them in a month!
Because my writing technique involves content editing as I go, that speedy writing was due to the stories nearly writing themselves, so there wasn’t much need for content editing. In fact, self-analysis tells me that my writing speed is determined by how much content editing is required. Or, to put in another way, how well-formed the entire story is in my mind (I don’t do outlines because they constrain me).
That’s my writing technique, of course. If yours is getting a fast first draft done with editing only in subsequent drafts, I suppose it’s possible to get the first draft done in a month like the organizers of NaNoWriMo encourage you to do. But, if you do no self-editing after that month, you’re being unfair to your beta-readers and other editors who’ll read the manuscript. In fact, no acquisition editor worth that title will want to receive an unpolished manuscript. Whether self- or traditionally published, your tale will need polishing before anyone else sees it, and that’s impossible to do in a month!
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Comments are welcome!
The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Here’s another example of what I mean by the above post: This bargain bundle of three epic sci-fi novels, none of them written in a month, should provide many hours of entertainment for any reader interested in sci-fi. Survivors of the Chaos starts in dystopia with multinational corporations dominating both the Earth and the solar system, maintaining order with their corporate militias. First contact occurs in Sing a Zamba Galactica as friendly ETs are discovered on the third planet colonized by human beings; a further contact with more ETs is not so lucky, and some collective intelligences out there in intergalactic near-Earth space just might blow your mind. Finally, if the first two novels represent my First and Second Foundations, Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! features my Mule, an autocratic psychopath who is out to control near-Earth space with psi armies. This bundle is a bargain you can find wherever quality ebooks are sold.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
