I have blogged before about NaNoWriMo, mostly during the years when was doing it. In case you don’t know, it stands for National Novel Writing Month and the goal for those who participate is to knock out the first draft of a novel during the month of November. Success is churning out 50,000 words within 30 days.
It is doable but not easy. Even with an outline to keep me focused on the direction the story is supposed to go, I often found myself trying to wring a few more words out of my brain while twitching from an overdose of caffeine. I’ve heard that NaNoWriMo allows generative AI, so I guess it is all effortless now. Just type “car chases and the human condition” into a prompt and let ChatGPT do the rest. Neat.
I did NaNoWriMo in the before times, 2011 through 2015 to be exact. By one yardstick, one could say I have written five novels. For some people, that is all the accomplishment they need. Let the draft sit there on a hard drive while they moved on to the next chapters of life’s journey. I was the same way for years. I kept writing but concentrated on short stories. I enjoyed the shorter cycle and lessened commitment.
Eventually though, I started to think that at least one of my five novel drafts might be worth salvaging. My 2012 effort seemed like the best candidate. Never mind that it had enough toilet humor to make Mel Brooks blush. What made it stand out was its comparatively smooth story arc and an ending that did not completely suck.
When I dived in to do revisions, I noticed a couple of things.
Over a decade had passed so the first to jump out at me was much had changed. The interwebs was a different animal as were the more prominent issues facing those doing their best to not get fucked over. I considered giving the novel a 2020s makeover but ultimately decided against it. For one thing, we live in a moving target. By the time I made everything current, reality would have likely shifted and my story would be as dated as before. Also, the protagonist is a drunk whose struggles are largely personal. Whatever year he happens to be living in is incidental.
Other than that, the biggest things I noticed had to do with what kind of prose a NaNoWriMo writer produces. First off, it tends to be verbose. When you are trying to hit your word-count quota for the day, there is a powerful temptation to write sentences like “In addition, Bob also went to the store as well.” The opposite can occur when you have hit or are close to your 50k goal. There you just want to wrap things up so you can have your celebratory drink. As a result, the story can be a little rushed, ending as abruptly as a Monopoly game where a sore loser upends the playing board and shouts “Nuclear bomb!”
The biggest challenge, I think, is trying to make the story cohesive. Think about it. You start out with an overall sense of the plot, but only in the broadest of strokes. The rest you improvise. There are some really good bits that can hit the page each day, but its totality is going to be a disjointed mess. It took a lot of passes before the prose follows logically from what was happening three chapters ago.
Maybe I am better suited to write short stories. Time will tell. Whatever the case, I am still glad I banged on Blackout Andy until it became something readable. And AI-free NaNoWriMo, despite its inherent flaws, helped get me there.