NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo

November for me is the great prelude to the bleakness of Michigan’s winters, a month of damp and chill and leaves that fall and then are quickly crusted under ice. I know that to many others, however, it’s thirty days of industry and self-recrimination known as National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.

I have a few minor objections to NaNoWriMo that I’ve made known in the past, though they shouldn’t stop anyone from participating. For one thing, the fifty-thousand-word goal to which people aspire is only half a novel, really. It’s a novella. Or a longer-form project. For another, NaNoWriMo's advertisement of writing a mere fifteen hundred words a day makes the composition process sound like a cakewalk, when even fifty thousand words is a marathon. It’s easy for people to miss their daily goal. What I end up seeing on the pages of my friends’ journals, starting even as early as the fourth day of the month, is usually an unending stream of self-reproach and even outright scolding for falling behind. Often that leads to people writing filler, padding scenes with unnecessary dialogue or utter nonsense in order to make a word count.

And finally (and probably most upsetting for me), NaNoWriMo tends to act as if the writing of the first draft is really all there is to completing a novel. The month’s over! You’ve got a novel! Call Random House! To me, revision is an essential part of the process. I usually go through three drafts of a manuscript before I dare submit it to my publisher. And I’m not talking about minor word correction and polishing. I mean rigorous, front-to-back deconstruction of the infrastructure I’ve created and taking the time to make it right.

Somehow, though, National Longer Form Project First Draft Writing Month, or NaLoFoProFirDraWriMo, isn’t as catchy.

Those quibbles aside, NaNoWriMo does give people an easy-sounding structure to work with. A deadline can be helpful for many people to give them the momentum to work. It makes writing approachable, and the results satisfying. It fires people’s imaginations and creativity and sometimes inspires people who might not ordinarily attempt a novel to sit down and write, and I’m all for that.

As the author of sixteen published novels and therefore allowed to claim the status as An Authority In The Field, I therefore offer a few little tips for my friends who are attempting the Herculean feat of writing a long manuscript.

1. Be aware that the first third of the novel is likely the most difficult stretch of writing you’ll encounter. You might have a vision of your story in your mind, shining and bright, completely with richly realized characters and scintillating dialogue, but the moment you start writing, it comes out kludgy and drab. Or else you have a brilliant start for a few pages, and then it all seems to fall apart. Yes. It’s going to be like that for a little bit, until you get into the rhythm of your characters and their patterns of speech. You’re also going to be trying to figure out the voice of your narrator, who is a character to himself, even if he’s narrating in the third person. There’s also the chance that you’ve overanalyzed all your characters so that once they start doing their stuff, they seem dull and lifeless. If that’s the case, you need to let them do something unexpected and see where that carries you.

The first third of a novel is always a tough haul for me. I usually give myself three and a half months to write a manuscript, and my manuscripts tend to be about a hundred thousand words, or three hundred typed pages. Usually it takes me a month and a half to write the first hundred pages, another month to write the last two hundred, and then a month to revise everything. Notice how disproportionately long it takes me to write that first third of the book? I accept it now, after doing it so many times. But in the beginning, it was awfully frustrating.

2. Picking up from the day before is difficult. You will want to do anything but write, when you sit down to your computer at your appointed writing time. You will want to surf the web or clean the toilets or give yourself that colonic you’ve always thought about, but you will not want to write. You may even feel vaguely nauseated at the thought of stringing words together. You will feel uncreative and void of any ideas. This is totally normal. It doesn’t necessarily go away, either. I still encounter the same feelings each and every time I sit down to work.

However. If you’re serious about getting your word count in for the day, you will need to hold yourself to it. Disconnect your ethernet cord or turn off your WiFi. Don’t let yourself open up that Bejeweled application. Sit there in front of your word processor and stare at it until grudgingly your brain taps out a few words, and then a few more. It might take a half hour or even an hour to kick in, but eventually the rusty pipes will groan and a trickle will emerge. Eventually that trickle will turn into a steady flow. Maybe not the gush you were hoping for, but enough to get by.

Want to know my simplest tip for picking up on your narrative the next day? Tempting as it may be to finish out a chapter at the end of your writing period, resist. Stop writing in the middle of a fiercely exciting scene. Oh, you might be tempted to continue, but that’s the entire point. Your mind will work on that scene in your downtime, even as you sleep. When you sit down the next day and open up your document, you’ll be itching to continue and get to the exciting resolution. The carrot-on-a-stick of completing something exciting is more potent a lure day-to-day lure than having to start something fresh. Trust me on this one.

3. And finally, be kind to yourself. Jesus, are you a professional novelist with a deadline? Some of you may be, but the vast majority of you aren’t. Sure, you may want to have the satisfied glow of knowing you’ve made your word count, and be able to show off your fifty-thousand-word badge on December first. But honestly, it’s more valuable an experience to write, to continue writing regularly, and to enjoy and learn from the process than it is to pound out random words and hate every minute of it. It’s better to take a year to write fifty thousand words than it is to feel guilty and berate yourself for thirty days for not keeping up. Your manuscript will be better for it, too.

Writing a novel is difficult enough. A writer needs to have confidence in what he or she is doing, or else the project will fizzle. Drowning out the litany of self-reproach—all the internal editor’s cries of Well THAT’S no good! and This chapter is going nowhere!—while listening to the story and its characters as a reader might, is nigh on impossible as it is. Pummeling oneself for not adhering to what is (let’s face it) an arbitrary and meaningless deadline is not going to make your compositional process any easier.

So be kind to yourself. Enjoy NaNoWriMo for the creative kick in the ass that it is, and don’t fret about the daily word count. Make it the start of a year of writing on a regular basis. In the end, you’ll be a better person for having followed your muse.