It's that time again... Carpal tunnel irritating, sleep depriving, frustration generating, plot ninja creating, write-in attending, flickguy tormenting, 50,000 words in 30 days.
For some reason the first thing people ask when I tell them I write a novel every November is whether or not they get published. I always laugh out loud. Mostly because the dreck that I pound out to make sure I keep up with the minimum 1667 words per day would not be good enough to paper a birdcage if you printed it out on gold foil. That is what happens when you turn off the inner editor, focus more on quantity than quality, and just enjoy telling yourself a story. Characters wander around and refuse to stick to the script. Plot bunnies and ninjas drop in out of nowhere to create great gaping plot holes, and to get you out of them. You have long rambling conversations between characters about random topics having nothing to do with your story, just to meet your daily wordcount goal.
At the end of the month, you are so sick of these disobedient children and their interminably dull conversations that you upload the words to the NaNoWriMo word counter to get your cheesy downloadable certificate, and then you save it to some dusty corner of your hard drive and hope to never see it again. And you tell everyone how much fun it was. Because it was. You accomplished something. It may have been silly, it may have been useless, and you will most likely never see your name on the bestseller list. But you did it! And that is the entire point.
Friday October 31, 2008 - 09:02am (EDT)
© 2008 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved
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