Rethinking NaNoWriMo
Posted on | October 11, 2007 | No Comments
I said last year would be my last year participating in NaNoWriMo. After the first two or three years, NaNoWriMo’s purpose for me became less about writing and more about networking, connecting and re-connecting with friends and fellow writers in the Houston and Texas areas. I loved getting together and pounding out words with someone, or just chatting about writing and stories and plots and characters. Most of my friends have stopped doing NaNoWriMo at this point, and I decided last year it was time for me to leave the madness to the new batch of writing enthusiasts.
The value of NaNoWriMo, to me, is in no way diminished. It’s something I think every novice writer should do once or twice, and experienced writers can benefit from a turn or two at fast-paced novel writing, as well. I learned a lot from my participation with NaNo – that I can write, that I can write fast and still have useful material, I discovered a little bit of my style, I learned how to set writing goals, how to scrape up time to write, how to discipline myself to sit my butt in a chair and write, and finally, I learned that writing 50K in 30 days is way too fast for me.
I still think of November as a “creative month”, and I think I always will. I don’t want to write 50K in 30 days anymore, ever again, but I do want to write. I have two new writing projects that I very much want to complete. One is a fantasy adventure story (if I ever finish it, it will be dedicated to James Oliver Rigney, in memorium, because he inspired it), and the other centers on a young woman stepping into the pro video gaming world. That one was inspired by meeting one of the the Frag Dolls, an all-women team of pro video gamers sponsored by UbiSoft.
I’d like to document the progress of the novel and blog about some of the stuff I learn about the inner workings of the pro video gaming industry, so I thought, why not repurpose NaNoWriMo, or at least the month of November to my own ends? Sure, I can shoot for 50K, but the upper limit of my productivity usually results in about 1K words per day. I want to concentrate on quality, and also on documentation of my writing process (useful to me, useful to others), rather than the number of words in my master doc file.
In a sense, I’ll be participating in NaNoWriMo, but I won’t be attending any local events. Now that I have a laptop, I often enjoy going out to write, and I’ll make it a point to do that more often once the writing starts. I’ll follow all of the NaNoWriMo rules (I won’t have enough research to start until November anyway), but I’ll have other goals besides the 50K – those goals might include procuring an interview for research purposes, or they might involve attending a game event. My focus will be the novel, not NaNoWriMo. And who knows? Maybe this will lead to the first novel I ever finish.
I’m in, but I’m not. In the sandbox, building my own damn castle. I’m not even using my old NaNoWriMo account – I made a new one. OctoberDreaming. Because I’m feeling more and more like an “October” and less and less like a “Moonsong”. As an aside, people in chat actually call me October and refer to me as October – when I was “Moonsong”, everyone called me Brandie unless they didn’t know me at all. Isn’t that interesting? No? Well, it is to me.
Without further ado:
NaNoWriMo 2007: Gamer Girl (working title) (REMOVED, ’cause it didn’t happen – too many other projects!!)
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