A Rebuttal

I've read a few articles like this since the beginning of November: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-gresko/national-novel-writing-mo_b_781313.html

If you don't want to read the article, I'll sum up: A number of people find no value in National Novel Writing Month because at the end of the month, people are not left with a quality product. If your aim is to write crap, why do it?

It's not untrue, but it's a shallow way of thinking about the real goal (at least to me).

1) Practice makes perfect

Go on. Draw it.

Even if you know you're not going to sketch a masterpiece, you  might sit in a park and draw that squirrel over there anyway. Sometimes we do things because we like to. Even if (like me) you want to be a professional writer, any chunk of time I designate for writing is good practice for later, and I might end up with something that turns out well.

2) Mad Skills
By the time I heard about NaNoWriMo for the first time, I loved writing, but I had never gotten to the end of a novel. I'd started and thrown away dozens. NaNoWriMo claimed that not only had a few people written 50,000 words in one month, but thousands of people did it every year. As as challenge to myself, I jumped in, convinced it wasn't possible since every idea I'd ever had fizzled after no more than 20,000 words.

"Silence your inner editor," the website said. That made me as uneasy as the wordcount. After finishing the first chapter of a novel, one of my favorite parts was going back and touching it up. But then I kept working on the first chapter and never progressed. So I tried it. I wrote an outline to help with the time restriction, and on November 1st, started with chapter one. I made plenty of mistakes, but decided to plow through and fix it later.

Every writer has a different method for getting things done. What I learned from NaNoWriMo is what works for me, and I might not have figured it out on my own. Though you will not end up with an industry-ready manuscript at the end of the month (I'm still editing the first novel I did in a month), you will learn things, get a lot of practice, establish a writing routine, and (hopefully) have a good time.

Word count for January: 50,231!!!

When I first heard about nanowrimo.org's project for getting writers to compose a 50,000 word novel in a single month, I thought it would be impossible. My longest work had barely reached 40,000, and that was after working on it for a year (and consequently scrapping the whole thing).

But after reading the website and seeing how many people actually accomplished their goals, I worked it out that reaching 50,000 words in a month meant writing 1667 words a day. Piece of cake. So instead of waiting until November when the website holds their competition, I decided to start right away with the month of January (call it a new year's resolution). Some days I wrote far more than my goal, some days I couldn't get to it at all - but on January 31st, my last day, I had only 600 words to go.

I liken a first draft to a globule of clay: you want to create a beautiful sculpture, so you first build the armature (the outline/notes), then you cover the whole thing in clay in the generic shape you eventually want it to be in (the first draft). By then, it doesn't look like what you want it to be - definitely not something you want to show to anyone else! But then you edit out the clumps that don't do anything for the story, and you gently and painstakingly sculpt everything that remains into your final product.

My stories go through a "test audience" before I start sending it for publication (usually on my 3rd draft - then I polish it once more after they read it and incorporate any good ideas they give me). Anyone interested in being a test subject for this latest one, let me know.