Why I am Not Doing NaNoWriMo This Year

As most of you – especially the fiction writers know – November
is the National Novel Writing Month and around 300k people are
writing their novels right now. Their challenge is to complete
50k words in 30 days, which may sound hard but I think it sounds
much harder than it is in reality.


Many of you were reaching out to me asking if I am doing
NaNoWriMo this year or not so I decided to make a separate
episode letting you know and providing explanations and thoughts
about the subject too. I wrote both of my novels Highfall and
DreamDown participating in NaNoWriMo and it was a great
experience.


There are few elements to it that I think are very important for
newbie writer. Most of us struggle to finish writing our novel –
especially if it’s our first novel. NaNoWriMo adds motivation and
encouragement to your writing process. First of all you have a
deadline and target wordcount + a challenge. And second, the
forums with writers like you who have the same struggles and are
as excited as you are adds to the emotional support that you will
definitely need while writing your book.


So that is why I participated in NaNoWriMo 2 years in a row and
as a result wrote and self published my 2 novels. This was the
good part.


Now let me continue by saying that this year I am not doing
NaNoWriMo and am doing something different instead. Before you
think that I am contradicting to what I just said let me explain
why. NaNoWriMo is good at making sure that you finish writing
your first draft. And as all of us know the first drafts are very
bad.


After that you will need to work on it. The first draft is
definitely not what you’d like your readers to see. I guess what
I want to say is that NaNoWriMo is good in making sure that you
put out those words and that you complete your first draft. It is
also very good in developing your habit of writing every day and
if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you know how
important that is.


But NaNoWriMo has absolutely no impact on the quality of your
writing. And that’s what differentiates the good book from the
bad one.


So what I did this year instead of NaNoWriMo was enroll in
writer’s bootcamp, where I will hopefully learn how to write
well. And as a non-English speaker the challenge for me is bigger
than for most of you out there. This is the second month I’m
learning at the bootcamp and I’d like to give a big shoutout to
Randall Andrews, who is putting up with my complicated
character and unpolished writing.


The first side effect that I got from being able to differentiate
good quality text from the bad one was realizing that what I had
written up to now is not written well. It’s one thing when you
know it as an abstract fact and it’s completely another thing
when you have proofs for that. And believe me, that realization
was not a very pleasant one and at some point it even made me
think of not writing anymore. But then I understood that by
learning how to write well I will be able to correct what was not
written well up to now, instead of deciding not to write at all.


So why I am doing re-writes and concentrate on the quality of the
writing is because if I did my 3rd NaNoWriMo I would most
probably write my 3rd novel in the same manner I did the previous
2 ones and end up with the same results in terms of quality. So
what I am doing now is going through my first novel Highfall and
applying what I have learnt so far to what I had written back
then. Like that I will learn on my mistakes, make sure I am aware
of the most common ones and make it easier not to repeat them
again in the future.


So I guess this whole episode gets down to one conclusion –
NaNoWriMo is...