The point of participating in National Novel Writing Month is to turn off your inner editor and write, write, write. The 50,000 words you have accumulated at the end of the month can be edited or left alone.
Last year I weaseled out 35K words. This year I’ve just broken 10K. The month isn’t over, but I find myself horribly unmotivated. In 2004, I wrote with reckless abandon; although a lot of the story was good, most of the writing was 100% unusable and uneditable. Last year and this year, it seems like I am just unwilling or unable to turn off that inner editor that is saying “If you write loads of crap, the law of diminishing returns is enacted immediately.”
I’m breaking one of Nano’s rules: Each year writers are to begin a new project. To be fair, I’m not sure if Nano enacts the “new project” rule to mean that you mustn’t cut and paste words written before Nov. 1, or if Nano wants totally new characters and storylines along with new writing. Since my first Nano in 2004, I’ve been working on the same concept. I can’t call it the same story, as it has progressed and changed over the years, but it is basically the same novel with more or less the same characters. I am very serious about writing and publishing a novel. It’s been a life-long goal, and I’m trying to stay focussed. My plan was to use Nano as the motivation to work on missing scenes and storylines from my novel.
As much as I want to accomplish the 50G goal, I’m not quite sure it is the best use of my time. It was very painful to weed through the bad writing from 2004. I still haven’t done it all yet. Does moving forward toward publication include Nano-style first draft? How are you doing NANO?
