[Edited 25Nov09: The official NaNoWriMo word counter found my novel to be 52101 words, not 52169, as my word processor did. Either way, I won!]
It is not quite six o’clock on Saturday morning and I have just completed writing the novel I started two weeks ago for National Novel Writing Month. At 52,169 words, it is being generous to label this a novel but given the guidelines we followed, it is. A short novel. A long short story. Either way, it is complete and it feels good.
Before you ask, no, you are not going to be able to read it. This particular piece of work was not meant to be read by others, only to be written and read by me so that I could learn from it. And learn, I did.
I had no concept of what 50,000 words looked like.
According to the software I used, my 52,169 words would create a 132-page paperback. To put that into a measurement I could understand, I looked to two of my favorite short novels: Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck; and The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first is only 107 pages; the second, 180 pages. I am honored to fit right there in between them, in quantity, if not in quality.
I had to write without editing.
When I write a blog post, I write hundreds more words than ever get published here. I tend to spew forth three and four page essays on the subject at hand and then spend hours editing and tweaking and deleting it down to a palatable chunk of words, hopefully not so large that people just sigh in disgust and mark it ‘read’ in their feed readers without at least skimming it.
The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to just put words on the screen, no editing allowed. It took me a while to find my internal editor switch and turn it off, but things went really well after that. It was nice to learn the joy of writing without continuous self-censorship. Apparently, I still know when I need that switch on because this post was about five paragraphs longer before hitting Publish.
I had to learn that storytelling is organic.
The novel I wrote was a story that had been rattling around in my head for years. I knew it backwards and forwards and inside out. I felt like I was cheating even writing it because it felt like I wasn’t writing, I was just taking dictation from my brain. But then, without even being aware of it, the story took its own turns in the telling. Characters were introduced, different situations were played out, decisions were reversed… all without prior thought or planning on my part. My fingers and brain were working together to tell the story as it should be told, not as my brain alone had been telling it for years. It was the closest thing to magic I had witnessed in quite a while. I want to write again just to experience that over and over.
I have to say the entire NaNoWriMo experience has been a positive one, even if there were a few angst-ridden moments, particularly at the beginning when I found it difficult to commit the first word to the screen. It did get better after that, once I built up my writing muscles, so to speak. I am fairly certain I will do it again. But I will not be waiting another year to write. In fact, I am going to do that now.
