National Novel Writing Month - It's Not Too Late! by Yu-Han Chao
How could we on this forum let November go by without a NaNoWriMo post, shout out, tribute, or rant?
I used to mention NaNoWriMo to all of my college students and dangle extra credit like candied carrots before any brave students willing and leisurely enough to attempt this prodigious challenge. But now that I’ve been teaching basic English at a community college for three years, where each little three-page, double-spaced rhetorical analysis is like pulling teeth, I am keeping my private, secret, almost-shameful-and-may-possibly-be-seen-as-insane noveling activities to myself this November.
In this community, most of the people, i.e. students I meet barely have time between their two jobs, 2.5 children, and classes to eat, feed children, sleep, and do homework. I feel shamefully bourgeois to be cuddled up in bed with two blankets and a stuffed animal pony the nice banker at Wells Fargo gave me, punching words onto my laptop after dinner every day. But if one browses the nanowrimo.org forums while procrastinating, one might notice that the other writers on the forum are also very busy folk, with children, jobs, husbands, wives, and school. Most of them are not professional writers, but they can commit to writing a fifty thousand word novel/novella in a month, and many of them finish the challenge!
If we consider ourselves professional, or at least wannabe professional writers, we ought to have that same kind of spirit, I think. Of course, everybody writes at a different pace, but through my years of attempting NaNoWriMo I’ve definitely realized that just sitting down every day and writing (or reading something lovely until you feel inspired to write, then begin writing) makes all the difference. An exercise like NaNoWriMo builds character, perseverance, even confidence. If you do it once, you know you can do it again, not necessarily in November, definitely not always in one month, because you know something you vomited out in thirty days between turkey and green been casserole isn’t going to be that great. But the point is you CAN write a book--if you sit down to do it. Extra points go to those who plan out characters and plot before hand. Ten times extra credit for those who revise meticulously and rewrite the draft multiple times afterwards.
So start plotting and start writing! You don’t have to wait until next November, you can make this NaNoWriYear. One note of warning to novelists looking for agents and publishers, however: historically there’s been a surge of queries to said agents and publishers right after November, because obviously a lot of novels were written during this month. So if you are thinking of querying some agents and have been procrastinating, query them now! Or you risk rolling in the limbo of December’s query slush pile, overlooked amidst all those synopses about zombies, werewolves, and vampires (I heard these are the trendiest characters) involved in some kind of apocalypse (also hot at the moment).
I did my first NaNo this year, and I completed the challenge with 675 words to spare! It was so good to have to write to a deadline, to just spew plotline, and to stay with my story without taking breaks, thereby keeping it fresh and interesting. November is an INSANE month to do this, but the experience was fabulous.
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As usual, a stellar post...
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Thanks, Kat. Good for you, DeNae! I cheated (with an already started manuscript) and just barely made it.
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