This week, I’m going to tell you why you should write a 50,000 word novel in November for National Novel Writing Month.
HOLD UP! Hear me out before you click away. I know, I know. There are reasons to bounce:
1. Why bother? I don’t want to write a novel
2. I am not a writer
3. I wouldn’t even know where to begin
4. I don’t have a story to tell
5. 50,000 words in a month? That’s insane. It’s too much work. I don’t have the time.
6. It will not be any good. No one will read it. What’s the point?
In these blog posts, I like to stick to what’s happened to me, share the way I’ve worked through many of them, and expose my day-to-day fears, attitudes and interactions. I’m not an expert in any field and am unqualified to tell you how to live your life.
However…
This post, I will give you clear suggestions and/or instructions.
Why? Because the world needs your story. Does that sound pie-in-the-sky? Like I’m bullshitting you? I promise you, I’m not.
But let’s take all the reasons not to write a novel, one by one…
1. Why bother?
When we dream up, create, and get our story down on paper, we shift the world. What if the thing ends up on a dusty old hard-drive in a storage unit, never to see the light of day?
Yes, even then. Because you will never be the same after you’ve done this. From December 1st on, you will have written a novel. You’ll interface with people in a changed way, you’ll have a deeper relationship with yourself, and it will improve your life in countless intangible ways.
You should attempt it to show yourself you can do it. Look, I’m willing to bet at least twenty of you reading this blog have run a marathon. What the heck was the end game there? I’m sure you didn’t do it intending to qualify for the Olympics. Surely you did it only to test yourself, to see if you could achieve this thing that few have achieved. Writing a novel is like that. We’re human beings. We like to set the bar. Run that marathon. Climb that mountain. Dive that sky. Write that novel.
2. I am not a writer.
Writing is not a title or vocation, it is an activity. So you may not have engaged in the activity of writing much (or at all), but that doesn’t deem you a non-writer. It means you haven’t practiced at it. We all drink up the romantic myth of natural genius— a guy or gal pops out of the fetal position, picks up a pen, a chisel, or a paintbrush and create masterpieces. However, most of those masters put their thousands of hours in. When most of them started, they weren’t a writer, a sculptor, a painter. But then they wrote, sculpted, and painted, and became so.
What? Oh, I see. You’re not a literary fiction writer.
Neither am I. I don’t know what the hell I am. My vocabulary has slipped over the years, and I destroy metaphors and similes like… something… that… destroys… something else. Here on the blog, I try to connect with you all clearly and simply. Like we’re having a conversation. When I write screenplays, television scripts, or fiction, I go even simpler. Look at the first chapter of my current novel under the Current Project tab. I ran that chapter through the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tool — it’s third grade level, folks. So what? The guys I love reading, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett— they got it done with plain, staccato language and simplicity.
You may be a literary writer, by the way. If you love William Faulkner, Barbara Kingsolver, or Thomas Pynchon, you likely are. We have a natural tendency to cop and steal from those we love. I don’t mean plagiarism. I mean the things those favorite writers do well: maybe he describes the utter beauty of a garbage dump, maybe she details out all the minutiae we see daily but take for granted, or maybe he cuts right to it and has the girl and the guy robbing the bank by page ten. Stealing from authors we love is absolutely okay. It’s how we find our voice. We steal until it becomes our own.
3. I wouldn’t even know where to begin
If you take this challenge, you’ll sign up for free at NaNoWriMo.org and find many tools that will help you. You’ll discover whether you’re a planner or a pantser.
Planners map out what the novel will look like— outlines, storyboards, index cards, legal pads full of notes— planners think things out before they put pen to paper on November 1st.
Pantsers go by the seat of their pants. They open a blank document on November 1st and crank away for thirty days until they have 50,000 words. They let the story tell them where it's going.
I’m a hybrid planner/pantser. I like to have a general idea of how it may end up, but I don’t stay married to the plan. One of the greatest feelings you’ll ever experience is when the story takes a life of its own. It’s coming from some deep subconscious. It’s an absolute trip. Scenes, characters and dialogue will flow out of you and you don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s better than any hallucinogen.
If after you’ve gone to NaNoWriMo.org and you’ve surfed all over the web for outline and structure suggestions (there's a ton of stuff out there), you still feel stuck, you couldn’t do worse than this:
A: For 12,000 words set up a problem your main character(s) want(s) to solve. Maybe they want to build a house, for example.
B: For 25,000 words (12,000 - 37,000), create problem after problem for the characters. Be cruel. Write yourself into a corner and see how your characters get out of it: your character falls from the roof of the house, the lumber yard goes bankrupt, their contractors walk off, your character runs out of money, a tornado tears the house down.
C: For 13,000 words (37,000 to the glorious words number 49,999 and 50,000: THE END), resolve it in a way that feels true. Maybe the house doesn’t get built. Maybe it does. You’re God in your little 50,000 word universe so you get to decide… unless the characters talk to you and refuse to obey.
NaNoWriMo is fantastic because it’s all about the community. How much does it cost? Not a thing. What do you win? Nothing more than self-respect and bragging rights. And along the way you take part with others as much as you want. There are live write-ins on YouTube, in person at local libraries, and MOST of the folks doing it are doing it for the first time. You’re not alone.
4. I don’t have a story to tell. Uh…rubbish. Yeah, you do. You have a story to tell and you are the only one uniquely qualified to tell that story. It may be fictional, it may be your true story, or it may be a blend. Write something you’d enjoy reading.
Here’s a test. If you’ve ever watched a television show or movie and have been disappointed by the ending— Damn! Why did she end up with him? That character’s too independent for that! Why is she marrying that schmo? It would have been so much better if she bought a plane ticket to— you have a story to tell.
When we were little, without all our social safety valves popping off, we made up stories all day long. Go to a park and watch kids play (don’t wear your heavy raincoat. You’ll get arrested for looking creepy). The stuff they make up on the spot will astound and delight.
5. 50,000 words in a month? That’s insane. It’s too much work. I don’t have the time.
This kept me from trying NaNoWriMo for years. You need a daily average of 1,667 words to hit your 50,000 word mark by December 1st. I didn’t have the four hours a day to plug away at 1,667 words. This is what my brain’s like— an idea fixes like cement in my head as an indisputable truth. But it’s based on nothing.
1,667 words a day = 4 hours of writing. That’s simple math, man.
Oh, you’ve tried it?
No, I just know.
Folks, 1,667 words a day takes me… 1.75 hours. And I do not type quickly. Once I wrote a few days, I found my rhythm: an hour a day, then whatever I needed on Sunday to catch up to the stats for the current date. Yes, math nerds, NaNoWriMo tracks all your stats for you. And you can see your friends’ stats. So fun.
I think it’s worth the effort… just for thirty days… to do one less set at the gym, watch one less episode of television, put down the magazines for a few weeks.
November 1-30. 1,667 words a day to experience the literary equivalent of a marathon? #worthit
6. It will not be any good. No one will read it. What’s the point?
We will file this one under the title: Who Gives A Shit?
Spoiler alert. It probably will not be superb. Not on December 1st. Do you know what you’ll have on December 1st? You likely won’t have Michelangelo’s David statue, but you will have a few chips in the marble. You’ll have something rough, wonderful, and something that's taking shape. The equivalent of a statue that people can see and say, “Yeah, I get it. It’s a naked dude, right?” And, with a polishing cloth and some elbow grease, it may become a kickass story.
What if you don’t want to use the elbow grease in the form of a rewrite? Then leave it. If you wrote 50,000 words in November and you typed THE END, then guess what, my friends? You’ve still written a novel. YOU. WROTE. A FREAKING NOVEL!
What if it’s a mess? What if it makes zero sense? Who gives a shit? You’re in good company. Joyce’s Ulysses makes zero sense (THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID IT! I don’t care who’s listening. Screw you, James Joyce, I’ll never get those hours of my life back)
I’ve created the mess. I have two novels I haven’t worked on since National Novel Writing Month a few years back. I don’t know if I will. They were my first attempts, but I promise you, I can still picture the world, the characters, and the adventure as if I’d been there. And I feel just as proud to have hit the 50k word mark with them as I did with my “successful” attempts.
Who knows? You may love writing novels. My friend Dave is a published novelist. When I asked him if he’d always written in that form, he told me it never entered his mind, ever. He did it one year on a lark. It changed the trajectory of his life.
Whether you fall in love with it and write your first of many novels, or you do it once and find the experience exhilarating, exhausting, boring, or therapeutic, you should just do it.
On November 1st, I’ll join countless others and open a blank document, and begin typing. Not all of us will make the 50,000 words or finish the month out. Today is September 10th and I have no idea what I will write yet. But I will say a prayer to the Muses, call in the fierce Warrior Spirit, drink a ton of coffee, and open myself up to tackling the month with my best effort.
If you join me, my username is Brendan O’Neill . Become my NaNoWriMo writing buddy, let’s encourage each other, push ourselves with healthy competition by checking each other's stats (shit, Geoff got his words in today already? All right, I can muscle through today), and see what comes out.
If you hit the 50,000 word mark, you will have created thoughts and sentences and word combos that no one has ever put together before.
That’s a writer writing. And it matters.