I was supposed to write a post about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November) during NaNoWriMo, but since apparently I’m trying to add a sub-specialization in procrastination to my MFA, that didn’t happen.
NaNoWriMo gets a lot of crap, partly because it encourages people to worry about quantity and not quality, and partly because of its cheery insistence that when you push out 50,000 words in a month, what you’re left with is a novel, when most likely you’re maybe 1/10th of the way there, not in word count, but in the work you’ll actually need to do to make those words into something anyone should be subjected to.
I found out about NaNoWriMo in late October a few years ago and decided to plunge right in. I had attempted to write novels before but had never been able to finish. I wasn’t a fast writer (and still am not), but I worked diligently and at the end of the month I had written 50,000 words of a young adult coming of age novel about a teenage girl’s year as an exchange student in India, heavily inspired by my own experience. Fifty thousand words isn’t really novel length, even for YA, and I knew the plot was incomplete. I continued to write, and after a couple months I had a complete manuscript of about 75,000 words. I spent a couple months editing and researching agents and began the querying process.
Even though the novel I wrote didn’t get me an agent and will probably never be published, I still believe that participating in NaNoWriMo remains one of the most important things I’ve done as a writer. Here are some of the most important things I learned by participating in NaNoWriMo and in the ensuing quest to get that novel published:
1) I could finish a novel.
This is huge. A lot of writers who have been writing seriously for years, even incredibly talented writers in MFA programs, sometimes have a bit of a phobia about actually attempting to write a novel. Workshops tend to focus on short stories rather than novels or novel excerpts, and while there is some overlap in the skills necessary to write a short story and a novel, in many ways, writing a novel is a whole different beast. Writing my NaNoWriMo manuscript, and even more importantly, taking the time to flesh it out and edit it in the subsequent months, proved to myself that I could write a novel.
2) Being a writer means WRITING.
Duh, right? Well, this is sadly easy to lose sight of. Sometimes writers feel like they have to wait until inspiration strikes or until conditions are perfect before they start working on something. Participating in NaNoWriMo taught me that when the process felt awful—each sentence like pulling teeth—the product wasn’t necessarily bad. And sometimes when it felt like the last thing in the world I wanted to do was write, once I actually got started, the words came easily. Basically, just like pretty much everything, nothing happens unless you get started and keep going. This is something I still lose sight of sometimes, even in an MFA program. Sometimes weeks pass without me doing any creative writing. This isn’t a great way to accomplish anything.
3) Agents are eager to find manuscripts they love.
One of the agents I queried contacted me months later, after I had given up on hearing from them. What had caught their attention wasn’t my query, but a review of one of their client’s novels that I had posted on my personal blog. They thought the review was funny and liked my voice, saw that I was currently seeking representation for a novel, checked their old e-mails and found that I had actually queried them months earlier, and asked to read the manuscript. This was not a beginning agent, hungry for clients because she had so few. This was an agent whose list includes the author of a best-selling trilogy that is being turned into a movie. So when people try to claim that agents aren’t really looking for clients or that you have to have connections to get an agent, it is one hundred percent bullshit. If an agent is open to queries, they really want to find manuscripts they can fall in love with and represent. Also, on a related note: be prepared for anything you post online to actually be READ. It’s probably a bad idea to ever write anything online that you wouldn’t be willing to say aloud to anyone’s face. In this case, I wrote something positive that was received positively, but the opposite could have easily happened.
4) Know when to throw in the towel.
Three agents read my novel. All three declined to represent me, citing similar problems with the manuscript. I could have continued to query relentlessly, affecting an it’s-not-me-it’s-you attitude, or continued to revise, but I decided that for me, for that particular novel, the right move was to set it aside. Since this novel was so heavily influenced by my own experience, I felt like revising it would prove a challenge, and because the subject matter was so personal, I wasn’t sure I wanted to make the changes that would be necessary to make the novel salable. Rather than waste time trying to publish something that might never be ready, I decided to move on and write another novel.
Even though the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo never amounted to anything, I learned so much in the process that in retrospect, it was a sort of dress rehearsal for the writing of my second novel, which although it’s shelved for the moment, is the novel that allowed me to sign with my wonderful agent Laura Rennert. If you’re someone who has always wanted to write a novel, do it. You don’t have to wait for next year’s NaNoWriMo to come around, but consider trying a writing regime that focuses on producing a certain amount over a finite time frame. It’s a great way to get over performance anxiety and perfectionism. Often, for me at least, what gets in the way of starting is apprehension that I won’t be able to put the story that seems so good in my head on the page the way I envision it. But of course, the first step is to put it on the page at all.