No Virginia, There’s No Such Thing as Writing Your Book in One Month

I’m not fond of November. It’s not just the crusty dormant fields and the trees stripped entirely bare by the wind two nights ago. It’s this contemporary phenomenon called NaNoWriMo. That’s trendy-speak for “National Novel Writing Month”. I shudder all of November, battening the hatches against the coming flood of manuscript submissions in early December.

How many amateur writers use this month to purge from their minds their great American novel? How many get to the end of their binge-writing month stunned at the brilliance of their own prose, expectations Everest high? Yes, they’re ready to hire an editor to give the manuscript only the lightest copyedit, since the thing is clearly PEN Award material as is.

Honestly, I don’t want to know. Enough of them will come to me at the end of this sprint to keep me occupied with gentle letdown convos for the remainder of the year.

I hate November. I boycott NaNoWriMo. It teaches fledgling authors to cultivate creative benders instead of working them into the marathon mindset and lifestyle required to craft excellent book-length work.

You are not going to write your book in a month. You might write 30 to 60,000 words of crappy draft content. It’s useful. But brace yourself for what’s next. Little of that 60K in content will show up in your final draft. Period. Consider this material as purely an intensive interview with yourself.

Once you’ve plopped that content onto the page, you will take out a highlighter and, like any good investigative journalist, you will mark the passages that might be useful. You’ll start asking the deeper questions that will help you develop those passages into usable scenes. You’ll interview your characters and the story itself to discover what this book is really about. You’ll look for that one topic you don’t want to wrestle with in this book. You’ll write about that.

And you’ll take the next 3 to 5+ years to hone and craft a work that’s finally ready to share with me, your line editor.

I despise NaNoWriMo. That said, I’m making a horrible back-peddling decision this year. I’m joining you. I’ve had enough people hit me with an insistent “Don’t knock it till you try it.” I have to admit, I am overly critical of a concept that at least gets people started in the book-writing journey.

I have a book project of my own that I set aside three months ago to focus on a few private client projects that were all coming to a close at once. I have a pocket of time right now when the schedule is a touch more manageable and I can get back to this beloved based-on-true project.

Now, I’ve already been working on Jackson: Memoirs of a Touring Actor’s Dog, for about two years. So it’s not like I’m diving into this cold. But the truth is, my resumption of work on Jackson is intersecting perfectly with NaNoWriMo.

What the hell. I’ll give it a shot. But on two conditions:

1. I don’t have to be happy about it.
2. At the end of the month, I’ll keep writing. Gimme another 2 or 3 years on this one before I’m ready to even share a draft with ya.

How about you?