I got the chance over the weekend to meet Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month, and hear him talk to an audience at MIT. The on-line writing challenge started in 1999 as "an over-caffeinated dare" and has grown from 30 participants to more than 42,000 last November. Chris's idea is simple: "Thirty days, fifty thousand words, you and your imagination. Go!"
I first signed up for NaNoWriMo in 2002 and completed a 50+K draft of a mystery novel--on December 2nd. In 2003, I tried to clear the decks of all distractions and minimize my other commitments in November. As my plans began to fail and item after item got added to my calendar, I gave up at about 25K. I tried a different strategy in 2004, concentrating on adding to the daily word count and making no particular effort to avoid other commitments. I even attended my first New England Crime Bake weekend smack in the middle of the month. I finished my 50,000+ novel draft with about two hours to spare. Last year, I followed the same strategy and finished ten hours before the deadline.
And that's what NaNoWriMo gives me: A deadline and permission to get on with the writing and to leave details like plotting and characterization to either work themselves out along the way or wait for the revision process. Chris Baty calls this "Releasing your inner MacGyver, the part of your brain that thrives on high wire, no net below, clock ticking situations."
So, I've decided to take on the challenge again in November 2006. I'm not sure what or who I'm going to write about yet. I might give some characters from a recently written short story their own novel-length adventure. I might develop one of the backstories from last year's NaNoWriMo project. I might ignore the highly-polished first chapter I wrote for a mystery novel about eight years ago and plunge into the story fresh and determined to see it through to conclusion.
Stay tuned. And visit
www.nanowrimo.org if you want to take up the challenge to write 50,000 words of "impressively adequate fiction."
