Start Typing: National Novel Writing Month

Where your first draft is concerned, the last thing you should worry about is quality. “Cranking out a first draft is definitely the hardest part of any sort of writing, so there's something to be said for the NaNoWriMo concept of just getting it down on paper without worrying about quality at the outset,” said Susan Coll, author of the novels Rockville Pike, KarlMarx.com and most recently, Acceptance. She recommends a practical solution: “Turning out 50,000 words in 30 days is going to require some pretty extreme, bootcamp-style discipline, however, and I imagine the only way to achieve this is to pull out the calculator and break down the word count and make a plan. If you commit to sitting at your desk until you produce 1600 words a day, there's the added bonus that egregious chores---laundry, raking leaves, grocery shopping---suddenly seem like fun.”

Novelist Leslie Pietrzyk, whose most recent novel is A Year And A Day, maintains a blog called, appropriately enough, Work In Progress, where she writes frequently about writing and the creative process. She echoes Susan Coll: “What I like about the concept of NaNoWriMo is that it advocates something I agree strongly with, which is to write forward. For me, the first draft is the process of finding your story and getting it all out there.”

For novelist Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of The Frequency of Souls, “community really matters,” and recommends involving friends in the effort. Or “if you're more inspired by a competitive community, recruit rivals.” Admitting that when she was writing she realized that she “had no time or story, but I knew everybody else was doing their work and that was enough to keep me going.”

Often the white heat of creative inspiration quickly gives way to writing doldrums, the feeling that you’re lost in the middle of the work with no solution in sight, or that you’ve got structural difficulties that simply cannot be overcome. It’s something every writer experiences, and Zuravleff has some practical advice for when the honeymoon portion of drafting your novel is over. “When things wind down,” she says, “make your characters squirm. Think of how boring the first few moves of a chess game are, then prepare to move your pawns one or two steps away from safety. If all else fails, reach out and slap someone.”

Zuravleff also cautions against heavy revising of your first draft before you've finished, providing instead a powerful workaround: “…the bracket, which eliminates revision (unfortunately, only in this draft) and guards against writing past 50K without finishing the book. If you decide that Bob must go or that the Russian Revolution needs to be included in exquisite detail, type ‘[Bob dies]’ or ‘[the Russian Revolution goes here].’ Brackets are easy to search for later and will allow you to skip forward, unencumbered by the work of actual change, which you may very well rescind.”

Again, to participate, go to the NaNoWriMo website and create an account, where you can also create an online profile, complete with photo if you’re inclined. You’re also invited to an affiliate with a home region; once you do, you’ll be provided email updates with on local events and forums, including “Write Ins” where you can meet up with other NaNoWriMo participants (according to the latest update, there are a number of in-person Write Ins scheduled around the area for tomorrow night as a way of kicking off the event; to find out where they are, register as a participant). Writing officially begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight; your word count will be verified by NaNoWriMo’s robotic word counters once you submit it to its web site.

So start writing. And keep going. And, for one last jolt of motivation, keep in mind the words of novelist E.L. Doctorow: "Writing a book is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights go, but you can make the whole trip that way."