A Few NaNoWriMo Thoughts

So, I’m taking a stab at doing NaNoWriMo this year, again. I tried in 2005, but didn’t start until the 10th, and gave up about 10 days later with about 10,000 words done. Last year I started right at midnight, and gave up around the 20th again, this time with just under 20,000 words done.

This year I told myself that I would finish no matter what. If I couldn’t stand my story, I’d just end it and start something else in the middle of the novel — who knows how, just flashback or flash forward to something else — to get myself to finish.

So here we are right around the halfway point. On yesterday, the 15th, I broke last year’s word count, getting up to 20,650. That’s not great, since I should have had 25,000 to be on track for 50,000 words by the end of the month. But it’s better than it was; according to the handy Excel spreadsheet I’m using to track everything, I was 6,238 words behind on the 11th. I’ve caught up, slightly.

By the way, the last few days the words have just been pouring out. I went into a dream sequence, which meant I didn’t have to worry about the plot and settings that I had established already. I could just write weird and random stuff. That was much easier and more fulfilling. I might just keep have my character falling asleep over and over throughout the rest of the novel and forget about the main plot.

Here’s my problem. My story is absolute crap. It’s the crappiest crap I’ve ever written or even thought about. I keep reading about people who plan on polishing what they wrote after November, and maybe sending it off to a publisher. There’s no way I’m letting anyone else read what I’m writing, because it’s completely beyond saving. Maybe I’ll toss it up on the web (anonymously, of course) and see if I grab a few search engine hits for 10 cents a month from ad revenue.

But because it’s so crappy, I haven’t told anyone I know that I’m doing it, since they’re just going to try to ask to read it. I can’t be having that. That means I’m limited as to when I can write it (i.e., not when other people are around.) I can get a few words in on the subway to and from work once in a while, but only if I can get a seat (of course) and only if nobody is sitting next to me where they could look over and read some of the unbelievably horrible crap that I’m writing.

So my self-consciousness over all the junk I’m typing into Word this month means that I’m even more limited to how often I can work on it, so I just can’t get to it often.

You might ask why I’m doing NaNoWriMo, given the crappiness of the novel. It’s not like I had any grand plans that I would write something decent when I started, I knew all along it would probably be bad. The goal was just to be able to say I’ve done it. I wrote a novel in a month. Of course, since I haven’t told anybody that I’m doing it, that means that I can’t really tell anyone. They might want to read it.

I guess in a few years I can say that I wrote a novel in a month and then burned it.

“How? You burned the hard drive that it was on?”

“Yeah, I burned the hard drive.”

“Couldn’t you just have deleted it?”

“That’s not dramatic enough.”

“But what about all of the other stuff on that drive?”

“Shut up.”

By the way, should I feel guilty about writing these 656 words here in this post when I could have been writing words in the Nano novel? I knew it, that’s some well-deserved guilt.