October 28th, 2009 by Chris Eng

There sometimes comes a point in creative people’s lives where, despite the solitary nature of their hobbies and/or trades, they have to admit that they can’t do it alone, that they need the support of other folks. And that’s a hard thing to accept for headstrong sorts. Being able to admit that you need someone else to lean on to get stuff done isn’t easy. It’s admitting weakness and, some might feel, defeat.

I’ve got about five or six partially competed novels sitting in my notebooks and boxes. It’s a collection I’m not particularly proud of, but I wasn’t sure what I could do about it. To be honest, the 3/4 point pretty much kills me every time. And I’ve reached the point where I finally need to say, “Yes, I need a support network, or I will never finish one of these things.” They will become the skeletons in my closet and I’m not particularly interested in raising a zombie army of half-completed manuscripts before I die. Which is why, in order to get past that block, I need the aid of something that makes the simple act of support fun, and that’s why I’m going to do the Nanowrimo this year.

National Novel Writing Month could be considered a contest of sorts, but the only person you’re really competing against is yourself. The aim is to complete a novel from start to finish during the month of November. You’re allowed to go into it with notes and plot, if you want, but you don’t start writing it until November 1st and you must complete 50,000 words by November 30th.

Signing up on the Nanowrimo website gives you a profile page and the ability to mingle with the other writers—about 80,000 so far (from a count that’s a couple of days old). Every day you input your word count and watch it climb toward your goal, which is a nice bit of visual encouragement. And twice a week, they send out pep talks from various established authors, just to make sure you stay on track and keep working at what you’ve started. This year, they’ve got Lynda Barry, Gail Carson Levine and Tamora Pierce (among others) on board. (They get a lot of YA authors to contribute, because there’s an entire Young Writers Program that collaborates with teachers in order to get kids to write—1,100 classrooms so far! Awesome!)

Schedule

I order to do the Nanowrimo, I am rearranging my life schedule. My computer recently died (I tried to give it some beer and it stopped speaking to me! It was Blue Buck, too! What gratitude!) so I’m sharing my wife’s computer. This normally doesn’t cause too many problems because we keep different enough schedules that I can get most of my computing done while she’s at work. If I’m going to be writing for at least two hours a day, however (I write at around 1,000 words an hour), I thought I should probably try to schedule it so I’m out of her hair as much as possible, so I’m getting up at 6am.

This isn’t the most outlandish time of day for me to be up and around—I’ve had jobs where I’ve needed to be up at 6:00, if not earlier—but I’ve still started scaling my wake-up times back incrementally. No, it’s not outlandish, but it’s not natural for me, either. Plenty of black tea will be drunk in November. Coffee, too.

Prep

You can go into the Nanowrimo with notes and prep, but you can’t start it until the first, so I’ve taken advantage of this and essentially plotted the book from beginning to end. Mostly. Some of the characters are a little rough in my mind and I’ve left room for the cast to deviate from my ideas, but I think it’s mostly there. It’s a punk romance novel, or, as I’d like to call this new genre, a “hoodie-ripper”. (Ever seen a punk wear a bodice? It doesn’t happen that often.) I can write 50K about young punks in love, easy.

Contact

If you want to do it too, you’re got about 3 days of prep left and then the shit’s gonna hit the fan. My screen name at the Nanowrimo site is chriseng. (I know—shocking right?) Feel free to add me. And let’s write some damn novels.