Every November for years I've seen people talking about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but I've never joined up myself. It always felt a little gimmicky, or I had other stuff I was working on, or any number of other dumb reasons.
This year, though, I've decided to give it a try. I've felt a little directionless with my writing for the past 18 months or so (gosh, I wonder what that could be related to), even when I had stuff to revise or write down. More importantly, it's been a long time since I've felt able to work on something longer than a short story (and even those didn't seem to be coming to me), so this felt like the right time to do it.
On top of that is the realization that to properly get ahead in publishing, it helps to have longer works. I've been focusing a lot on novellas lately, but have also been finding it hard to find markets that would take them. A novel, on the other hand, seems easier to shop around to agents, which seems like the most reasonable port of call for getting ahead with my writing.
It helped that I finally had a novel idea, which I spent a little while developing earlier this year. I outlined it and wrote a few world-building type documents, that would help me get a sense of the structure of the story and the tone I wanted to strike, but then I found myself distracted by my tech/telecoms blog, and didn't do anything more on the novel idea for a while.
Incidentally, the tech/telecoms blog was so easy to work on because I knew, month to month, what I wanted to do with it. This is what I mean when I say my fiction writing has felt directionless - I had a short story idea a few months ago, and I got as far as the first (hand-written) draft, but in the transition to the typed second draft, I couldn't make it work or muster much more interest. With the other blog, on the other hand, the subject (comparisons of age-related mobile plans in various countries in Europe) dictated the structure, so I knew that after I finished writing about plans aimed at seniors in Italy, I could write about plans in Italy that were aimed at kids.
It's the same with the novel I'm currently working on. Because I spent some time figuring out the structure earlier this year, I know what I want to accomplish in most of the chapters, and can spend my precious and limited writing time accomplishing it, rather than getting hamstrung by all the possible things I can do. Of course, this is the kind of thing that works for me, so maybe a different type of writer thrives on that ambiguity.
As far as the actual NaNoWriMo, it turns out the goal is to write 50,000 words in November, whereas I always thought it was 30k. It doesn't matter either way, as the important thing is to have something workable at the end of the month, and because my writing sessions are regularly yielding much less than 1,000 words, let alone the 1,667 I'd need to average to get to 50k. It's still satisfying to go to the website and input the number of words I've written that day, and see the little meter tick up. I probably should have tried gamifying my writing ages ago...
In any case, it seems to be working, i.e. I have something to write that's holding my interest, and crucially I'm looking forward to certain scenes later on in the story. Even if I don't have the full 50k words by the end of November, I'm aiming to continue writing this initial draft into December, so fingers crossed that I'll be able to do something with it in 2022.
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