NaNo Post Mortem

At the start of this NaNo season, my friends over at NaNoWriPod threw in the towel.  Most of them haven't succeeded at NaNo since I've known them, so having a podcast about it was getting too strange.  But they ended on the note that NaNo is kind of useless, since after a month, even if you win, you have a heaping pile of garbage that doesn't have an ending.

My reaction to this is OF COURSE YOU DO.

First drafts are heaping piles of garbage, especially first drafts of novels, where you had an idea half way through and NaNo wouldn't let you go back to edit, so you just kept going with it from the middle as if it had been there all along, leaving yourself nothing but a cryptic note in the margins for you to find in a month and puzzle over.

NaNo is for writing horrible first drafts, and the rest of the year is for editing.  If you only write during November and you only write a first draft, then, yeah, you're not going to get much done and you might not enjoy it.

The problem I ran into this year was that I was not in the right place in my writing cycle to write a first draft.  I had the second season of the podcast launch on November 16th, and I had a book proposal due to my agent at the end of the month.  That means I spent a lot of time editing and polishing rather than regurgitating first draft nonsense.  For the first half of the month, it looks like I participated in NaNo every three days, and that's basically what I did: writing a draft of an episode and then editing the next two days to get it ready.  The second half of the month, I would update my word count and the apparently not hit enter or something and I'd log back in the next day to see that they hadn't been counted, and then I was too lazy to go back and spend the time to figure out how many words I'd done.  Since I wasn't going to win anyway, it seemed kind of useless to even log in.

I really like NaNo.  I like the community.  I like the emphasis on vomiting out a first draft so you have something to work with later.  I like the emphasis on letting it be awful.  But I think that as you move forward in your writing cycle, it gets harder to set aside projects in progress to do NaNo in November and easier to cough up a rough draft without all the scaffolding that NaNo provides.


You know I'll sign up again next year.