I can’t remember where I discovered NaNoWriMo, but I know the idea floored me. 
Write a 50,000 word novel in one month: November. Quantity over quality: cage the inner editor and just…write, for an entire month. For those who always wanted to sit down and pen the Great American Novel, here’s the deadline for your first draft.
While that wasn’t me, it sure as hell sounded like fun.
2002 found the perfect storm of events for me to get sucked into the WriMo vortex. I was at SIUE having one of my easiest (and most successful) college semesters, and that it was fall did not hurt. Without the changing of the seasons my life would be a drab affair, and my favorite transition has always been the one into colder air, with the vibrant fall colors, the anticipation of the beloved holiday season and the reintroduction of hot chocolate, not to mention my ability to drag out my superior winter wardrobe. (Not gonna lie, I’m kind of a stud.) The combination of university life, sipping Starbucks in the university center, pounding away on a laptop while the temperatures got cooler and cooler was an addicting combination.
I managed to get 10,000 words out before I lost all hope.
2002 Excerpt:
Mortimer the Proud had been missing for a month, but here he was, curled up on Shane’s welcome mat. The jingling of his keys awoke the feline, and upon recognition of his master a rather loud meow resulted. Shane never knew his cat was a hunter; bred from birth entirely in his house, the animal rarely liked venturing outside even for a moment and showed very little ability to capture prey under his roof, either. Shane halfway looked forward to the day his home was invaded by mice, just to see if his pet would run away from the rodents just as he did whenever some strange person dared enter the cat’s domain. Now, lost for a month, here Mortimer was, looking just as plump as the day he disappeared. Maybe some older feline took him under his wing and showed him the ways of the wild. Maybe one of the neighbors took him in and kept him fed, forgetting to call and tell him that they picked up his only housemate. Or maybe his cat had been replaced with a more street-savvy clone, alike in appearance but not in mind. It was probably the last one.
Interest was never my issue with NaNoWriMo, nor time. Both of my fall semesters in ‘02 and ‘03 were not incredibly busy, and the last three falls were spent working at Circuit City. Plenty of time to slip in those 1,677 words each day, with catchup time on days off. Still, ‘03 brought the world no more than 2500 of my words, with ‘04 a paltry 2800. ‘05 was a non-starter, with your author caught in Denver on a business trip for the first four days of November. NaNo had slowly evolved into a huge NoNo.
2004 Excerpt:
Rick Setser wasn’t the most popular kid at Carlisle High as he began his junior year, but his 1997 red Mustang started to change that. Acquired by his uncle from a lot in Indiana, they spent the summer of 2003 fixing it up, and when Rick pulled into the parking lot behind the high school on the first day of school he erased any chances of being asked how he had wasted his summer vacation. Seniors who had made fun of him in years past gawked over the condition of the vehicle, its loud motor filling the parking lot with enough sound to completely drown out the first bell notifying students to get their tardy asses into the building. His girlfriend, abandoned during the summer months he spent in Indianapolis, could only watch as she became his ex-girlfriend; the more popular girls of the class of ‘05 swarmed around him in admiration of his vehicle, one-by-one demanding that he take them for a ride after the abbreviated first day of school.
Then came 2006.
I came up with an idea. Inspired by a Bruce Hornsby song (even if the novel had nothing to do with the song – seriously,) and given time to brainstorm while visiting Emily in Carbondale on my days off, I hatched an interesting plot about a small family in Southern Illinois dealing with the effects the changing economy were having on their small business, and how the return of the protagonist’s long lost wild baby sister promised to help. The idea was unique, the characters had promise, and most importantly, for the first time ever, I had an ending. And a great one to boot.
I prepped and prepared. A notebook was filled with character details, plot outlines and other random ideas that could be worked in. I purchased Chris Baty’s No Plot, No Problems Letters from Iwo Jima on dvd
, an excellent guide to NaNoWriMo that got me further pumped for the affair. November came and I my story laid out such that I could dive in and flesh out the details, and suddenly Microsoft Word was alive with the sound of awesome.
Then my inner editor escaped and said “ROWWWWRRRRRR!!!!! YOUR WRITING SUCKS!”
2006 Excerpt:
Not much had changed, she thought, as she moved throughout the center aisle in an almost dancelike fashion, twirling around as if to consume the sights from every possible angle, her purse flailing about and barely avoiding a dangerous collision with an oven. The merchandise had been updated in her absence; certainly the televisions were a far different picture from when she last laid her eyes upon them. Still, the row of glistening washers and dryers were a more than familiar sight, as were the mammoth refrigerators opposite them, still obviously polished everyday by the proprietor. The white and black square tiles sparkled from a recent scrubbing, though the beige walls, once white as one-half of the floor, had seen better days. This had all been beaten into her memory just as much as the comfort of her mother’s smiling face, and she smiled as the small gaps in her recollections were quickly filled in.
No computers, though. She smirked at his obstinacy.
The characters weren’t clicking, especially the lead, who came off too stoic and boring. Too much dialogue, not enough action. Blah blah blah. What was supposed to be a mere first draft was being picked apart like I was suddenly a literary agent, or even someone who reads fiction at all that doesn’t have to do with murders along Route 66.
21,612 words into November my characters fell silent.
Puccini for Beginners video
I don’t know if I’m in love with NaNoWriMo or the idea of NaNoWriMo. People getting together in coffee shops typing away at their personal masterpiece, having word wars and dares as their work slips further and further into a state of absolute ridiculousness…and closer and closer to 50,000 words. Even if my writing is done in solitary, the feeling of pounding out those early words in the dawn of the eleventh month are a rush, but perhaps moreso is the anticipation that’s felt in October. Brainstorming, checking other people’s NaNo blogs and constantly checking the WriMo forums for what other daring “novelists” are thinking and fretting about – such fun. The community aspect is endearing, connecting you with thousands of other wannabe scribes worldwide, some more successful than you, and many even less so. Maybe that’s the most fun, combined with the fantasy of the coffeehouse novelist and the upper crust attitude it subscribes you to. I don’t know.
What I do know is November is 21 days away, and plot or no plot I’m going again.
The first three years I entered the project with no clear idea of a plot, and the result was boredom for the author. Not knowing where I was going, I ran around in circles trying to come up with ideas as I wrote, and the result was a lot of plodding dialogue and exposition that led to a great big nothing. The worst was 2004 when I started what promised to be an interesting murder mystery without having any clearly designed structure or characters, making my task of crafting a complex story quite impossible. Basking in the failure of that season, I didn’t even attempt NaNo the following year.
