National Novel Writing Month Works For Me
By Diane Barnes
If you see me during November, chances are I’ll be blurry-eyed, exhausted — and exhilarated. I’ll be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an online writing event that challenges writers to draft 50,000 words during the thirty days.
NaNoWriMo refers to itself as a “fun, seat-of-your pants approach to creative writing.” I describe it as a mad writing frenzy that is a torturous type of fun. I’ve participated before. It beat me up but never delivered a knockout punch.
The first time, I wrote 50,000 plus words that I eventually transformed into my debut, WAITING FOR ETHAN. I remember being ridiculously tired, gaining weight because I was sitting at my desk so much, and missing out on fun outings with family and friends because I spent all my free time writing. Still, I must have liked it because I signed up again. The second time, I ended up with the first draft of my forthcoming novel RESHAPING PEGGY.
In both cases, my finished novels have as much resemblance to the 50,000 words I wrote during NaNoWriMo as my 22-year-old niece does to the ultrasound image I saw of her at 10 weeks. I know the stories originated with those early words, but no one else reading them would make the connection.
In between WAITING FOR ETHAN and RESHAPING PEGGY, I was on deadline from my publisher. Though it wasn’t November, I used the NaNoWriMo approach to write that book: bang out the words until you get to the end of the first draft and then revise.
I’m chipping away at my fourth novel now. It’s the first time I haven’t used the NaNoWriMo approach — and it’s not working. I’ve been writing deliberately, thinking about where the story is going before I write each scene. I’ve introduced characters, cut them out and then brought them back to life. I’ve written and rewritten every chapter numerous times. As soon as I’m comfortable enough to share pages, my writing group critiques them— and then I rewrite. At this point I have a bunch of good chapters, but after almost a year of working on this story, I don’t have a completed first draft. That’s why I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this November.
It gives me the freedom to write garbage. The words come gushing out of me. My fingers fly across the keyboard barely able to keep up. Because I’m not plotting in advance, I can follow the characters where they want to go, and more often than not they take me places that surprise me. I don’t stop to read what I’ve written, and no matter what, I would never let anyone else read those pages, never mind critique them! It’s stress-free writing. It’s a blast and it’s productive.
At the end of November I’ll have 50,000 words. Actually because I got a head start, I will have 75,000 or so. They’ll be a hot mess. I’ll need to revise, rework and then revise my story over and over again. I’ll have the power to do it though because by writing my 50,000 messy words in such a short time, I’ll learn exactly who my characters are and I’ll have a better idea of the story I want to tell.
Most important, I know this: I will finish this novel. After putting myself through the hellish kind of fun that NaNoWriMo is, I will feel obligated to see the book through to its completion. At least that’s what happened the first three times I did this. Wish me luck.
Diane Barnes is the author of Waiting for Ethan and Mixed Signals. Her third novel, Reshaping Peggy, will be published in fall 2019. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook at @FenwayScribe or visit www.DianeMBarnes.com to learn more.
