Here we are on the precipice of another year of attempting to write 50,000 words in a single month for the ritual of NaNoWriMo. This will be my third effort. I go into it this year with a bit of trepidation. I worry that the politics of the nation will be too much of a distraction. I will have to discipline myself to concentrate on the task without reading or watching the news every five minutes. This will be especially difficult in the first week of November, and will continue to be difficult depending on how things go. Even if the election goes the way I like, I fear that the aftermath will continue to be dicey and the urge to know “what’s going on” will be too strong to resist. And if things go badly, I worry that that will absolutely kill the creative urge. I tend to be more productive when I am happy and not angry or fearful. On the other hand, the task may be just what I need to keep me from obsessing about that other stuff.
On a different note–one having to do with the process and the result–I worry about generating still another 50,000 words that I will then need to do something with. It’s impossible (I think) to achieve the goal and end up with anything remotely like a finished draft. So revision will be necessary–and I’m still sitting on 100,000 words from the last two Novembers! I thought about using November as a revision month–but I have become somewhat addicted to the generative buzz of both the November and April writing marathons. I guess it’s a good problem to have an abundance of material. Finding the energy and time to polish up all that stuff will be the challenge of the following months; but if 2022 and 2023 are any indication, that is a challenge I have yet to successfully meet. There should be another month dedicated to revision–one that would draw together the same kinds of communities that are attracted initially to NaNoWriMo and NaPoWriMo. It’s not so much the community that inspires me–I don’t really interact with it socially; its the presence of the thing, its formality, its ritual; that’s enough for me to keep going. I belong to a mostly generative writing group that Zooms together every Wednesday. That’s all the social writing connectivity I need. Interacting with the wider NaNoWriMo community would be, for me, another distraction. I don’t know how people do it.
Last year I entered November with a few thousand words already penned. It gave me a nice head start. And I chose to work in short, micro-chapters inspired by titles that were all kind of starting places–they served also as first sentences. This year, I don’t have as much of a head start, but I am flirting with a similar strategy. I asked one of my writing group buddies to generate titles for me–and she came through in a big way. She gifted me 50 titles and I’m thinking of them as a kind of prompt for each day of writing. One other strategy I used last year will serve me well again this year: novel schmnovel. My effort last year did sort of evolve into a work of fiction with a central story-line–but it was improvised, not planned and there were lots of digressions and cross genre experimentation. I started last year by holding on to the concept of a “novel” as loosely as I possibly could. I am interested in generating new fictional material and am less interested in genre. I’d actually hoped this year to hold on to the micro-chapter strategy, but to forgo any sort of dedication toward plot or through line–so instead of a novel, I end up with something like 50,000 words of flash fiction.
It’s only a day away. I’ve thought about sharing my progress here on the blog–but I’m trepidatious about that as well. I don’t know why, but it seems to be true that while I have no difficulties publishing early drafts of the poems I write in April, I experience a ton of internal resistance to doing the same thing with my fiction. If you’ve read this far, and would like to weigh in, I’d encourage and appreciate that! Otherwise, if you’re playing along, I wish you luck and hope you’d wish me luck as well! Here we go!
michael jarmer 