NaNoWriMo? No. But Maybe Something Else

One of the other blogs I read regularly mentioned something called NaNoWriMo. Intrigued by the acronym, I googled it and found the aforelinked website. For those of you who don't like clicking on links, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The month in question is November. The challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel starting on November 1 and finishing November 30. For those of us who are comics types, it's kind of like 24-Hour Comic Day but without the pictures and a lot longer.

What do you get for accomplishing this feat? You get a nice certificate, a little web graphic, your name on the winners' list, and a 50,000 word novel complete with all the sense of accomplishment that comes with that. No publishing deal, no free lunch with an agent, no promises of fame and fortune. So why do it? Well, it probably has a lot to do with that shiny sense of accomplishment. You'll have positive proof that you can write a 50,000 word novel, that you can meet a pretty tight deadline, and that it is possible to just sit down and get these things out of your system. How many us have an idea for a novel in some stage of development right now, whether it's just a hint of an idea, a notebook full of concepts, or a big text file of disconnected paragraphs? How many of us just keep picking it up and putting it aside because of some section that isn't coming together, some story problem that's too har to solve, some sentence that isn't quite perfect? That's the kind of thing NaNoWriMo can help with. The point is not to write the perfect version of your novel. The point is to get 50,000 words down in thirty days. Some of it is likely to suck, but when you're done, you will have a completed version of your novel. And hopefully, there will be some little spark of of something wonderful that can be nurtured and cultivated, but that likely wouldn't have come about if you hadn't pressed on and written those 50,000 words and all of that crappy stuff. You can always go back and refine and edit and add and cut anything you want. But now you have a framework. You're not just looking at a blank page and holding the whole story up until that perfect word arrives.

So you're probably wondering if I'm going to be participating in NaNoWriMo. Or maybe you've already guessed based on the title of this entry. I'm not going to do it. I think it's a creat idea and anyone with an in progress novel should think about trying it. (I'm looking at two people who may be reading this who really should consider it.) But I think I have a pretty good reason for bowing out. I don't have a novel. In fact, I don't know that I've ever had a real solid idea for a novel in my life. There have been ideas that I thought were novels in the works, but really I think I just wanted them to be a series of novels because that seemed cool. They didn't have enough to them to be actual novels.

What I do have is a bunch of short story ideas. And as a matter of fact, I was just reminded of one of them this morning. So I was thinking tha maybe I could use this idea to get me working on at least one of them. Sort of a LoShoStoWriMo, if you will. I may not even wait for November. In fact, I may set up a second blog for that purpose and start writing in the very near future. I may even let you see it if my first drafts don't suck too much.

I'll keep you posted.