NaNo - Writing in the Cracks

I've surprised myself. I'm up to 21,000 words and still going with NaNoWriMo. I'm not even sure how! Maybe because this is a book that has been in my head for 2 years, and I'd already had one disastrous attempt at it in another form. I can sense that, as I write, I am padding enormously. Putting in heaps of description and character stuff - thoughts, dialogue, emotional reactions - that might well come out later or be trimmed. But isn't that the whole point of NaNo?

It is for me. It's the chance to break new ground, to get stuck into a whole new project or even (although I know it's kind of cheating) to finish that book-of-the-heart that you've never been able to before. About three years ago I used NaNo to rewrite a novel I've been working on for about 9 years. I didn't look at the old draft at all. I sat down and started it as if it was completely new. Lots of stuff came out that ultimately was really useful. That book is now on its way to being published. No, it's not a NaNo book as such, but NaNo helped me get a whole new perspective on what it could be.

I'm about to head off to Hong Kong. I have (by my calculations) about five days in which to write as many words as I can. After that, teaching and consultations take over and I am so brain-dead that writing is almost impossible. But I will keep trying. If I can get past 35,000 by Monday night next week, I might have a hope of snatching time and head space to finish the big 50.

Often that is what NaNo becomes - a frantic search for the cracks in your life. The 15 minutes or half an hour in which you can madly type (like I did in my lunch hour the other day), or that hour before bed when you firmly turn off the TV and write. If nothing else, I think NaNo teaches you that you can write anywhere, any time, if you really want to!

The NaNoWriMo Race

I spent most of October trying to decide if I was going to do NaNo again this year (all right, not most, just a few moments every now and then!). That's the thing with NaNo - it's easy to build it up into this huge thing when the whole idea of it is to simply write. And write. And write. For the past five years, November for me has meant Hong Kong. I go there for two weeks or so, teach lots of writing classes, run training seminars and do school visits. It's pretty full-on, and although I try to write, by the end of the first week, I'm kind of short on headspace for writing.

So the question for me is: how many words could I write in two weeks? Can I get such a good head start on NaNo that I could coast the last two weeks? If you've ever done NaNo, you know the answer to that is nearly always NO. So I know from the outset that I'm unlikely to reach the 50,000 words. That would be enough to put off a lot of writers I know (the ones who stay up all night on the 29th to get to their 50 big ones).

But I see NaNo as an opportunity to launch into a whole new project. To obsess about it for at least 15 days, to get a huge amount of words written that I otherwise wouldn't manage. It's the focus of NaNo that works for me. When you have to write every single day, and write as much as you possibly can (no measured 1667 words a day for me), the story fills your head. You go to sleep thinking about it. You wake up thinking about it. This morning I woke up and thought about my story and realised I'd left out a crucial element in my first chapter. So today my first job is to go back and weave it in (that'll give me another 300 words or so!).

Are you doing NaNo this year? How are you going? Did you get off to a roaring start? Share your thoughts!

Another Inspiring Speaker- Chris Baty

This week, we had a special guest speaker for our fiction writing classes - Chris Baty, better known as the guy who invented NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. This takes place every November, and in 2008 nearly 120,000 signed up to try and write 50,000 words during the month - that's around 1667 words a day, every day.

Chris is a great promo for the whole concept of NaNo - he talked about the realities of committing to write that many words, and while he conceded that November was a bad month for students (and teachers with grading), really there is no bad or good month for writing. You will either make the time or you won't, and obviously many do.

He had lots of information about NaNo, and told us how it started - with a group of his friends in San Francisco. I love the image of a huge bunch of them (about 20) all heading into a cafe with their laptops and extension cords and power boards, taking over the tables, ordering lots of coffee, and then sitting together, writing. I'd never really thought about NaNo before as a group exercise. After all, most of us write alone, usually in silence or with our own selection of music. But now the idea of writing occasionally with a group (I mean writing a substantial amount of words, not doing a writing exercise or two) is something I'm getting quite interested in!

In a cafe would be even better. You could set a time limit for those who wanted or needed regular breaks (for me that would be to combat computer scrunch and RSI), and those who didn't want to stop or be interrupted could sit at a different table. I also like the idea of forming an email group, although inside the NaNo website, you can team up with your writing buddies and keep track of each other's word counts there. That's a great benefit when you're on opposite sides of the world.

The one big problem with Chris's talk today was that afterwards we all wanted to go out right there and then and sign up for NaNo and get started writing. Never mind anything else!!! But one of the other things he said that I liked was about not "saving" your special big novel idea for NaNo. That's something for you to work on and develop at the right pace and level when you're ready. NaNo is simply about writing. One student said to me that she was thinking about putting her memoir aside for NaNo and just having a go at a romance for the hell of it. That's the NaNo spirit!

Now we're talking about creating a student NaNo group when November approaches, and organising weekly get-togethers. The major work for the year will be nearly over, classes finish mid-November, and really, they'd have no excuse not to write!! And neither would we teachers. Now, I don't know about romance, but I think I feel a Western coming on...