My NaNoWriMo Experience

Guest blogger, Battlestar McCormica

NaNo is the best. That is the word on the street, and by street I mean blogosphere, and by blogosphere, I mean, holy crap did I just use the word blogosphere? What an asshole. But I’ve also heard people say some pretty negative things about NaNo. There’s the complaint that real writers don’t need to spend a month favoring quantity over quality. I call bullshit. A little quantity never hurt anyone. There’s this thing called revision, see. Then there’s the whiny contingent that bitches about how NaNo creates too much work for agents. Apparently agents are deluged precipitously with manuscripts from neophyte authors. To that I say oh, those poor cultural gatekeepers. Their plight is right up there with political refugees and childhood leukemia victims. Did those mean old writers fill your inbox with queries? The poor dears.

The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that it makes room for all types of writers. If you’ve never written a novel before, it’s a great time to give it a go. And if you write regularly, it’s a great time to get a first draft down, or to experiment with new genres and styles. After all, it’s only a month. If the manuscript blows, you can throw it out and just be proud that you pushed your boundaries—be they boundaries of quantity, sleep deprivation, or general good taste.

Last year was my first year NaNo-ing. I’d written several full length manuscripts, but I’d never been able to maintain a regular writing schedule. I figured that if I did NaNo, I’d be forced to adhere to the daily requirement of just under 2,000 words. But of course I couldn’t manage it. I laud anyone who can write daily. I am jealous of you, but I don’t understand you, and apparently I will never be one of you. As it turns out, it is totally possible to do NaNo irresponsibly. I started late, didn’t write for days on end, and then managed three consecutive sessions of 10,000 words per day. I nearly died, but my NaNo buddies got me through it.

I wrote so feverishly, that I had no idea what I was writing most of the time or where any of it could possibly be going. Most of my 50,000 words (50,056, thank you very much), were composed in something of a fugue state. When I was finished I was terrified that I hadn’t actually written a novel—that what I’d been doing was more like automatic writing—that if I read it, I’d find Latin invectives, and gibberish about hellfire and damnation.

It wasn’t until February that I finally got up the courage to look at my manuscript. It turns out it wasn’t crazy gibberish at all. In fact, it was some of the very best writing I’d ever done, and since I’d no idea what happened in it, it was fantastically fun to read.

I am so excited for NaNo this year that I can hardly stand it. I’m jumping out of my skin. Writing is a solitary job, and sometimes the lonelies and the crazies creep in if you’re not careful. But the sense of community that NaNo provides can make you feel like what you’re doing is normal—heroic, in fact. Sometimes it even makes you feel like there are crowds cheering at you to tilt at your windmills and fall on your face. 

Battlestar McCormica writes under the anagrammatic pseudonym of McCormick Templeman. Her first novel, tentatively titled The Puzzlebox, is forthcoming from Schwartz and Wade/ Random House in 2012.

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