NaNoWriMo No More

It’s been a while. Apologies. But I’m back.

Today, my partner read something from Medium ( https://medium.com/behind-the-words/rip-nanowrimo-df08ae8995cd ) about the closing down of NaNoWriMo. My immediate thought was: “It can’t be true,” but on reflection, and as a one-time devotee of the challenge, I was not surprised. Yes, I did it almost every year since 2003, I’ve written books on it ( https://gerald-hornsby.com/nanowrimo-2020/ ) and even delivered workshops on it to other writers. But lately… well, not so much.

Why did it close? A series of scandals, issues, problems, call them what you will caused a lot of reputational damage. But the main reason was lack of funding over many years. The organisation’s interim executive director Kilby Blades, provides the full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR6NnjgeIIY 

When the challenge first came to my attention (as I said, in 2003) it sounded like a fun idea. I was always up for a writing challenge, and who wouldn’t be attracted by a National Novel Writing Month? 50,000 words during the calendar month of November, each year. No prizes for completion (other than a natty downloadable PDF certificate), and a chance to blow the cobwebs from your writing.

Chris Baty first created it in 1999 in San Francisco with just 21 people. At its height, there were over a quarter of a million writers signed up. To be honest, as a Brit, I found the American-style razzamatazz a bit… too much, you know? Most of my compatriots were young women, which always made me feel a little awkward, if I’m honest, and at the meetups, quizzes and social events, I felt like the proverbial square peg.

The one HUGE positive from this was when I met my now partner, https://anitabellibooks2020.wordpress.com/  and http://www.anitabelli.com/ through NaNoWriMo. The year was 2013, she had just returned from Spain, and had joined a local NaNo group. There, she had seen a post from me about self-publishing – something she was interested in, and something I had been doing and seemed knowledgable about. We arranged to get together at a NaNo writing meetup in Chelmsford. We spoke for a long time, and discussed our writing careers and what self-publishing could offer.

At the time of writing, we’ve now been together for six-and-a-half years.

Back to writing. Over 20 years, I’ve written nearly 1 million words under the NaNoWriMo banner. Alas, most of those things were unpublishable. And this is one of the problems with something like NaNo. It’s just too damned fast, and yes, you may get 50,000 words, but the whole product, far from being a novel, needs a serious redrafting and editing before it could be considered a viable story – at least, that’s what I found. And that, dear reader, was too much of a mammoth task for a scatterbrain like me, because there was always a better and more fully-fleshed novel idea in the back of my head, ready to go.

Every year, the same. Fifty thousand words, and a ‘novel’ to put away until I could face beating it into some sort of shape.

Don’t get me wrong – there have been some great successes along the way for others – writers who used NaNo to Get The Novel Written, and then went on to publishing success. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Water For Elephants by Sara Bruen, The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill, Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, Wool by Hugh Howey, and The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer are just a few examples. 

In recent years, I have moved away from speed writing a novel in a month. After I had built up a heap of 37 (yes, THIRTY SEVEN) Works-In-Progress – of NaNo novels and other works – I needed to sort myself out. With the massive help of a local writers’ group and a stern talking-to from myself (and, it must be said, with the discovery of the Save The Cat method of story construction – https://savethecat.com/  ) I have, since 2018, successfully published eight full-length novels.

Now, I no longer need NaNoWriMo to get me to put words on paper, or to give me the figurative kick up the backside to actually sit down at my laptop and DO SOMETHING.

I shall miss it. In many respects, it changed my life. And have many, many fond memories, not the least of which occurs when I look across at my beautiful partner. NaNoWriMo brought us together. 

So I bid farewell, and adieu, to the writing challenge in the same way I say farewell to an old rocker who shuffles off this mortal coil. Man, you were great in your prime, but recently… not so much. Thanks for the memories.

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NaNoWriMo – how did it go?

The short answer is: not well. After a good start, and being well on course to write 70,000 words for the month (which would have seen another successful NaNo for me), I injured my back.

Not doing something heroic. Oh no. Not skiing down a glacier, or climbing a great peak. No, I injured my back… feeding ducks.

As a result, I could stand, I could lie down, but sitting was too painful for more than 10-15 minutes. I kept going, I tried to stay on track, but I began to fall further and further behind, and ended on the 24th November with just 17,629 words in the project.

If you want to see some of the update videos, I have made a playlist. I tried not to moan too much about my back! LINK HERE: [ NaNo23 Playlist ]

Am I downcast? Maybe a little. Not for spoiling my run of “wins” (my winning streak was up to 14 before 2023). For me, NaNoWriMo is about what it does for me and my writing goals, rather than being an end in itself.

I shall pick up the project again early next year.

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NANOWRIMO – the planning (2)

At the end of the last post, I detailed the story beats thus:

Act 1 – opening before investigation, setup, initial enquiries, decision to progress

Act 2A – maybe side story (love interest?), detailed investigation, first obstacle, 

Act 2B – the investigation gets more difficult, MC suffers biggest obstacle, things look bad, oh – hang on…

Act 3 – new impetus, new ideas, closing in on the culprit, knocking red herrings aside, final disclosure, rounding up, return to normality

At this point, I’m eyeing up one of my favourite processes, which is 100% the key to all of my novel writing in the past five years – maybe longer.

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NANOWRIMO – the planning (1)

Over the years, I have listened to many authors speaking on their process. It’s always interesting to hear how “the professionals” do it. I remember one author (whose name I have genuinely forgotten) who told a group of aspiring writers that during the editing process, he rewrote his completed manuscripts at least 10 times.

I thought I had misheard.

But no – he wrote, and rewrote, his whole manuscript for each novel at least 10 times.

At the time, I hadn’t published any novels, and I was keen to hear other people’s methodologies. But ten complete rewrites sounded completely bonkers to me. Surely, there was a better, more time-efficient, way?

Indeed there was.

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It’s NANOWRIMO time, and I have no choice

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, comes around at the end of October each year. From a local challenge in San Francisco in 1999, with just 21 participants, it has grown to a global event, with hundreds of thousands of writers joining each year.

As you might expect, with a name like National Novel Writing Month, the idea is to write “a novel” in a single month – the 30 days of November. The actual size of the “novel” is determined as 50,000 words, which means participants need to write an average of 1,667 words per day to be successful in the challenge.

I first heard about this challenge in 2003, and it sounded like fun, so I signed up. And I “won” – the prize being a downloadable certificate and the self-satisfaction of having written a whole bunch of words in a single month.

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Publication Day!

One of the few problems with publishing a new book is the need to update websites.
Today sees the day when my updated NaNoWriMo advice book goes live on Amazon in ebook and paperback. It’s been reorganised, rewritten, with new content and a fresh new cover.

Like the two previous versions, I have taken the experiences of 16 previous attempts (succeeding 15 times) and working with and alongside other NaNoWriMo authors, and I’ve created some guidelines, a timeline, tips and advice, and not a little inspiration, too.

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