NaNoWriMo – am I insane?

I’ve considered taking part in National Novel Writing Month for the past few years, but never took the plunge. This year I’m actually going through with it. The goal is to write an entire novel, of at least 50,000 words, between now and November 30.

This kind of goes against everything I believe in. When it comes to novels, I am a slow writer. My first novel, which I never finished, was in progress from my senior year of high school until a couple of years after I graduated from college. (I joked at the time that I’d spent a fourth of my life working on it, which was true, but also painful.) The one I’m finishing up now has about six years invested in it. In between, during the year when I foolishly thought that novel was “done,” I started another one that I got maybe 150 pages into before I felt like I was really starting to understand what it was about. Then I put it on hold indefinitely.

To make a long story short, let’s just say that for me, writing a novel has never been a quick and dirty affair.

Okay, but there’s also this: I don’t want it to take me another six years to finish my next novel. Now that I’ve written one to the point of “so close to being finished I can taste it,” I feel like I have a much better understanding of how a novel is structured, and of the process I need to go through to get it done. I thought this novel was pretty solid back in 2007 when I “finished” it, yet during revision process, I’ve rewritten almost the entire book. The storyline hasn’t changed, but themes have been pumped up, dialogue has been reworked, the narrator’s perspective has shifted. It’s sort of like how every seven years, the molecules in your body completely regenerate. Over the course of six years (and mostly in the last 14 months), my book has become an entirely different manuscript from the one I started with.

Knowing this, why should I even obsess about the early stages of a novel? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to bang it out as quickly as possible—and with as much forward momentum as I can muster—and then take some time to really think about the story, the structure, the characters, and use that quick first draft as the basis for the inevitable revisions and rewrites that will turn it into a real boy?

Maybe yes. Maybe no. I’m willing to try it and find out.

I started yesterday. So far I have 4,271 words. This is brand new, not a regurgitation of anything I’ve written before. I’m not going to go back and edit what I’ve written. The goal is to just push forward. I have a basic idea of what’s going to happen… and by basic, I mean I know that one character is going to get romantically involved with someone, and later in the book with someone else. There will be a love triangle. They all work together in the same office. And, um, that’s about the extent of it. I’m not even sure of the narrator’s name yet.

Worst case scenario, I spend an hour or two each day in November forcing myself to write something that I end up trashing at the end of the month. Even if that’s what ends up happening, I think it’ll be a worthwhile experiment. But as I know from writing short stories, sometimes the coolest ideas come out when I’m not thinking about them at all. Writing a story and not knowing where it’s going to end—surprising myself with the ending— is one of my favorite parts of being a writer. I’m kind of hoping that’s what will happen during NaNoWriMo. Keep your fingers crossed.