50,000 Words from Armageddon

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is a creative writing project started by Chris Baty in 1999. 'Celebrated' every November by certain members of the more literary portion of the world, the challenge consists of writing 50,000 words of a novel, from scratch, by the end of the month. For reference, 50k words is around the length of The Great Gatsby; that is, not a long novel, but definitely more than a novella.

The purpose of this challenge, originally, was to overcome some of the creative difficulties associated with writing a novel. Many people (oh look, weasal-words!) assume that having a fixed deadline is detrimental to the creativity of the artist, but this is not always the case. Much of Jonathon Coulton's work, the Thing a Week series of albums, was written with the goal of completing (you guessed it!) one song per week. Some of it isn't very good, but much of it is, and this is a testament to how deadlines can, in certain contexts, facillitate the artistic process.

Burgeoning authors initially feel intimidated by the prospect of beginning to write a book, and once they do begin can find themselves stuck agonizing over what they've already written rather than pressing forward. Ultimately, this is destructive to the creative process, because it interupts the flow of ideas, and causes one to be overly-critical of the component pieces of the story rather than looking at the story as a completed whole.

NaNoWriMo cuts away this threat. Editing is officially suspended until December, and writers are guided by the challenge's motto: No Plot, No Problem. When in doubt, participents are encouraged to simply keep writing, and let the characters sort a plot out for themselves.

While 50k words in a month only requires writing about 1,666 (.66666...) words each day, making those words form a cohesive whole isn't easy. Many participents don't succeed - of 119,000 in 2008, only 21,720 reached the 50k word mark. Those who do (and even those who do not, I suppose) have gained both a valuable insight into the methods of fiction writing and a solid first-draft of their ideas, which a few go on to successfully publish.

I've one friend who is an English major, and a long-time NaNoWriMo participant. She's successfully completed the 50,000 words for the last four (I think?) years. Its a grueling process; by the end of the month, she's running on coffee and grim determination, and the novel has devolved into "John walked into the oh god why am i still doing this store and bought a something." Still, it's the effort that counts, and painful as it is, she's always satisfied by the results. Which is why last year, she made the rest of us do it, too.

If you were going to write a novel, what would it be about? Maybe a romantic tale of loss and longing, where the heroine's betroved is carried away by the winds of war to leave her pining on the docks? Or a dark-haired action-girl who battles mutant robo-zombie biker gangs across the barren wastelands of post-apocalyptic Japan? A hard-boiled detective thriller? Searing political allegory?

Before you ask, no, I didn't finish. I did, however, get to the halfway mark, a goal I adopted during the last week of November, when I realized I didn't want to fail out of Statistical Mechanics over a writting contest (regrettably, I did anyway).

I was still quite pleased, mostly because I beat everyone else among my friends who wasn't majoring in English, but also because it feels surprisingly good to take an idea that's been floating vaguely in your head for ages and turn it into a concrete product. And, while it might not be something anyone else could enjoy reading (I have a vague feeling that the plot is entirely too obscure for someone who doesn't already know how it ends), I can honestly say that I'm proud of what I wrote.

No, I will never let you read it.

The story could, I suppose, be called a pre-apocalyptic mystery novel. Someone is trying to bring about the End of the World, and its up to a plucky student journalist and her reluctant survivalist Teacher's Assistant to figure out who and stop them. There's math involved. And katanas. The grad-student may or may not have an evil twin. The journalist may or may not be from the future.

Told you no-one but me would read it.

In any event, my English-major friend just informed me a few days ago that, for lack of better things to do over the summer, there was a high probability of her participating in something she called 'JulNoWriMo'. It turns out, some people find writing one novel a year to be too easy, and so devote the month of July to writing a second novel, again of 50,000 words.

She then challenged me (more or less; I may or may not have suggested it in the first place...) to finish the novel I had started in November. Another month of writing, at 25k words per month, would put me at a single, complete version by the end of the summer. And naturally, I accepted her challenge.

So, this July, I'll be writing fiction. This is fair warning, then, to expect posts during that month to contain addendums on my progress ("Today Josh fought zombies, and Kim did something endearing!"). Posts might also get a great deal shorter. Still, I'd like to encourage anyone with a bit of a literary side to give the writing-a-novel-in-a-month thing a try, either in July or November.

Next Time: Five Essential Chess Openings & Five Essential Philosophies