[tunesmith]

I'm in a small writing club and all four of us are trying it. I successfully finished it two years ago with a series of ten interlocking short stories that (surprise!) tell a complete story as a novel by the end.

One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality. They talk about vomit-drafts, and/or just sitting down to write to see where it takes them, to see what the characters will do. I don't think that mindset is very compatible with story forms that requires mystery or twists or foreshadowing. My story this month has that so it's been difficult. I'm at 11,000 words now and we're late enough in the month that it's telling me I have to write more than 2,000 words/day to finish. Soon I'll be past the point of no return, where it will be practically impossible to catch up; I think the most I've ever written in a day is 5,000 words.

Ah well, it was still good motivation, and I'm signed on enough to my concept that I'll probably finish it even if I'm not done on 11/30.

[5555624]

>One thing I notice is that a lot of people use it as a project to just get words out, regardless of quality.

That's the point or at least it was in the early days. NaNoWriMo came out of Chris Baty's book, "No Plot? No Problem!" and the point was to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days. The point was to sit down and write. As I recall, the book mentions "One Day Novelists' as in "One day I'm going to write a novel...." It's just a kick in the pants to get you to sit down and write. Don't edit, don't re-write, just write.

I've done (and completed) NaNoWriMo a dozen times (2004-2013, 2015, 2020) and I've never had an outline and only a basic idea of a plot when I started,, mainly because I didn't want to start writing before 1 November. One way to handle twists and foreshadowing is not to write it in order (I used to bike to and from work and those 40 minutes each day was when I'd work to what happened next or what happened to get to where I was in the story.)

The first year, I took the "scientific approach" and started out just writing 1,667 words a day. While that was always my daily goal, I did abandon it. The most words I wrote in a single day was 10,596 (20-Nov-2007).

[boznz]

Congratulate yourself it is a great internal achievement to finish writing something. I just published my first book this month, I'm not sure how the mojo came, it certainly wasn't a special month though I did manage 10K words during last NaNoWriMo.

The floodgates opening for me was being stuck in a hotel room during a cyclone for 3 days without power and an old Chromebook which I nursed to fourteen hours of battery by turning the brightness all the way down and closing the lid to put it in sleep mode during the times I was thinking. That got me the re-start I needed.

[tunesmith]

hehe that is an awesome story. I've always loved how constraints somehow make us more creative rather than less.

[criley2]

For the record, the point of NaNoWriMo is pure word count, and folks consider December to be "National Novel Editing Month" where you refine the word vomit.

Obviously this is not the only approach to writing, and some folks are incompatible with the concept of "just write with abandon" and "sort it all out and refine it in edit".

If you want to write and edit at the same time, consider halving your total word count (since they take two months to do that), or double your time (and continue through December).

[WorldMaker]

Related to the "word vomit" aspect of it, I've found a general rule of "wait at least 6 months" for the first edit pass to be helpful to me (rather than December my "National Novel Editing Month" is closer to June). From my experience I often am too critical trying to revise it immediately and having distance and forgetfulness helps a lot to better spot the jewels in project and polish them rather than dwell as much on the dreck and "word vomit" which you can simply rewrite or even delete. I was surprised when I mentioned it last night at a write-in how many hadn't considered forcing some distance between (very) rough draft and trying to make a proper first draft out of it.

[Jemaclus]

Well, the explicit goal of NaNoWriMo is word count, not quality. You aren't wrong in your analysis, but NaNoWriMo is not the event through which you write complex stories and spend a ton of time thinking about each scene. It's pretty explicitly for plowing through as many words as possible in 30 days.

An analogy I would make is that a marathon is measured as 26.2 miles. It's not measured in minutes or hours -- it's not the 2:30 run, for example. The standard of success is measured in miles, not minutes. Similarly, NaNoWriMo is measured in words, not quality or twists or ready-to-be-published state.

You are right, though. It's good motivation. I've finished every year for 10 years, but I've never gotten anything to a state I would consider to be even remotely publishable. :)