'Tis the Season to Write a Novel

November is almost upon us, and that can mean only one thing: Time to stock up on strong coffee and wrist pads in preparation for National Novel Writing Month, known to us literati by the only slightly cumbersome abbreviation NaNoWriMo.

As a literatus(?) yourself, you’re already aware that NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write a complete 50,000-word novel from scratch in 30 days. Now why on Earth would you want to put yourself through such an ordeal? There’s really only one reason: You fancy yourself a novelist but have never actually written a novel, and that little detail will nag at you for the rest of your life if you don’t do something about it. The genius of NaNoWriMo is that it faces you with an implacable deadline, which is pretty much the only thing that motivates would-be writers to actually write; as founder Chris Baty said in a recent email interview,

When most people give themselves two years to write the first draft of a novel, what they’re really doing is giving themselves two years to procrastinate and feel guilty about not working more on their novels.

As humans, we need a deadline to really get moving on something, and stay focused long enough to see it through to completion. When it comes to novel-writing, having an absurd, taskmastering deadline breaks this long, terrifying journey into manageable bits. Writing a novel is hard. Writing 1667 words a day for thirty days is not.

The only way to do this is to turn off what Baty calls your “inner editor”: that nagging voice that’s constantly questioning whether what you’re doing is good enough.

As book-lovers, I think we tend to mistakenly believe that our own first drafts should be roughly on par with the books we buy in bookstores (forgetting the fact that every book we love has been revised several times, usually by a team of people). When our own efforts fall short of our favorite books, we feel like hopeless hacks, and tend to just give up entirely.

When you write a novel in a month, you have to lower your expectations from brilliance to simple completion. Since no one could possibly write a great novel in thirty days, the fog of self-criticism that tends to hover around our creative endeavors lifts. Plots and characters are allowed to breathe and grow without being second-guessed and fretted to death.

But that’s only half the story. The other genius of NaNoWriMo is that it turns writing, which is often a drearily solitary undertaking, into something of a social event. You can follow the progress of fellow-novelists or participate in forums on the website, or if you’re in a major metropolitan area, participate in write-ins at cafes or local watering holes. This year, Baty and the Office of Letters and Light (the organization that has sprung up around the NaNoWriMo phenomenon) will be hosting a gala “Night of Writing Dangerously” in San Francisco and sending out twice-weekly “Celebrity Pep Talks” from such luminaries as Philip Pullman and Piers Anthony.

In so doing, Baty and company are endeavoring to actually make writing fun. The audacity! Dr. Johnson must be turning over in his grave (or maybe preparing to stalk the Earth in zombie form; it’s Halloween-time, after all). But that reminds me, I lied earlier: There is a second reason to put yourself through the NaNoWriMo paces, which is because you’ve already done it and a) enjoyed it or b) want to put the painful lessons you learned into practice.

So whether you’re a grizzled veteran or an anxious virgin, it’s time to ask yourself, “Is this the year I write my masterpiece?” There’s only one way to find out.