NaNoWriMo

And awaaaay we go. National Novel Writing Month ("NaNoWriMo") is here again. This is an audacious literary project in which thousands of writers attempt to write a 50,000-word novel (roughly 175 pages) during the month of November. The point isn't to write a perfect finished novel during that short span, which is probably impossible for anyone other than a boilerplating hack (or James Patterson and his cellar-bound writing slaves). The idea is to force would-be writers into writing as much as they can, every day. Rough grammar and dead-end plots are tolerated, even encouraged, to get writers off their duffs and into the habit of writing on a regular basis.

I had a great experience with my first NaNoWriMo last year, even though my novel stalled at only 14,000 words. My novel was (and is) a very basic story that I had been kicking around in my head for several years without ever getting around to starting. NaNoWriMo was a great kick-in-the-pants for me (a chronic procastinator, to put it kindly) to finally put the story into writing. I'm resuming the novel (working title of "Eden") this year. It's a pretty ambitious effort for a first novel, incorporating several big themes (19th Century pioneer life, canal-digging, the utopian movement and Irish ethnic identity) all at once. But if I'm going to fail, I'd rather fail spectacularly than churn out something that's not intrinsically rewarding.

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