Dear Novelist,
You did it.
Despite everything else going on in your busy life, you managed to pull off the creative coup of writing a 50,000-word novel in just one month.
When the going got tough, you got typing, and in four weeks, you built vast worlds and set them in motion. You created characters; quirky, interesting, passionate souls with lives and loves and ambitions as great as yours. You stuck it out through the notoriously difficult middle stretch, and pressed onward as 80% of your fellow writers dropped out around you.
And now look at you: A NaNoWriMo winner. And the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and we’re proud to have had you writing with us this year.
This “manuscript” has a lot more going for is than last year’s, very little of which was salvageable. This one has some bits and pieces I think can be used, once I let them sit for awhile and steep a bit. I may add on some more since the ideas are there and I want to see what happens next. I think I know but they — the people in the story — are going to tell me: I’m not telling them anything.
So what is it about this that works? It’s the deadline, of course, and the resulting daily quota of writing. You could write less — anywhere from 500 to 1000 words would be respectable — but the sheer effort of 50,000 over 30 days is what makes this work. Unless you’re an amazingly prolix type, it’s hard work to come up with 1,500 words, some characters, a world for them to inhabit, some motivations, obstacles, conflicts, all that, every day of the 30. The awards text above makes it clear: a winner is “the owner of a brand-new, potential-filled manuscript” and potential, of course, means you haven’t done it yet.
Do I recommend it as an exercise in creativity and mental marathoning. Sure. I have done it three times, completed it twice, and learned something each time.
See you next year?
Now playing: Vertigo by U2 from the album “Live from Under the Brooklyn Bridge – EP”