I'm taking a break from NaNoWriMo to respond to D's last post where she had some misgivings about participating in probably the WORLD'S GREATEST CHALLENEGE EVER.
If you don't already know what NaNoWriMo is, check out their website for the full details. The short story? From 1st November to 30th November you write a 50,000 word novel. 50,000 words is the recognised count for a short novel so... you write a novel in a month! Only 1,667 words per day--easy, right?
Ha ha, my friend. That's where you're wrong. Ha ha, I say to you again. Life gets in the way. You get tired or your husband gets man flu. You forsake your social life, the gym. Want to go for a jog? Well, you can't, skippy, you've still got 785 words to go before you hit your daily target. Oh, friends are going out and they want you to come along? Well have you hit your word count yet? No? Hm... I wouldn't if I were you.
That's how my brain talks to me in November. Seriously. It's like having a teacher inside your head, constantly barraging you about whether you've done your homework or not. It's intimidating. It's scary. I'll probably never be published. But you know what? It is as fun as hell. How many of my friends can actually say they've written a novel? Zilch, nada, zero. It's a bragging right! Fingers crossed, this will be my second novel this year. I've even got my first on my Kindle; it's a horrible piece of crap but it's like it's a real live book! Ah, delusions.
Anyhow, I wanted to answer D's points from her last post. She wrote:
1. I feel as though one of the key qualifications to being a good writer is to have read many books--many, many more than I have. It helps you understand the concept of a novel as well as various styles and strategies to convey your message.
2. I have no clue what I would write about. Most of the "moral messages" I'd want to send would parallel way too closely to my own life. Fictional works and autobiographical works don't exactly overlap.
3. Between my lack of confidence and my lack of motivation, I would decide that my novel is stupid and not worth writing by November 3rd.
Let me answer each point.
1. You can't tell me you haven't read enough books to have an idea of style and strategies in novelling. I've seen the books you read as well--you're reading the same stuff I do and I'm 26! (Well, okay, duh... there is this blog of course where we read THE SAME THING once a month but you know what I mean).
2. I never have a clue what to write about until about two days before NaNo starts. Last year, the first year I actually completed the challenge, I only had one character name and an image in my head of something I witnessed in Paris. That's it. I wrote a novel off the back of that (albeit a craptacular one). The point of NaNo isn't to write anything good, it's to write. Period. And yeah, it takes a lot of time and pretty much sucks the life out of you but at the end the victory is sweeter than sweet. And as for autobiographical stuff leaking into fiction? First rule of writing is to write what you know. Now, for the book I'm writing now I may know jack all about being in the music industry and partaking in hard drugs (rock and roll, yeah!) but I do know about my main character's back story because there's bits of my own in there. You'd be surprised how many words you get out of writing about your character's house or friends purely because they're a mirror image of your own. It's like the material's already there, you just have to copy it! You can plagiarise yourself and your life and stick different names to it all... that's totally okay.
3. Stupid? Have you read my novel from last year??? Oh, no, wait, you haven't. You know why? Because it's papier-mâché material. Seriously. It's beyond bad. It's like, "Young and the Restless" trying to be hip. My main character gets amnesia, for crying out loud! ( I got stuck and needed the word count, okay?) There are no stupid novels unless they're read by others and judged as so.
So next year, D is going to do NaNoWriMo with me. She just doesn't know it yet.
S
PS - not counting what D wrote, all of the above amounts to 655 words. Seriously. I could have put that towards my NaNo word count. You're lucky I'm ahead of the game and edging into 9k territory on day 3.
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