Reflections on NaNoWriMo

So it occurs to me I never told everyone about my NaNoWriMo 2011 experience.

To the few who might not know, that funky word is an acronym of sorts for National Novel Writing Month, which occurs every November. It's more than a decade old now (I think) and 256,618 people around the globe took part this year.

To "win" NaNoWriMo, one must write 50,000 words in the month. You may start midnight Nov. 1, and you end 11:59 Nov. 30.

Of all the people that did it this year, 36,774 were winners. That's 14 percent of participants. For the record, I am part of that glorious 14 percent. The Lexington participants alone wrote 7,794,287 words in the month.

In total, 3,074,068,446 words were written.

I wrote a shade of 50,000 of them in a novel tentatively called "Faith in the Age of Reason."

The book was intended to be the story of estranged friends/activists in the fields of atheist and Christian thought who during a national tragedy of unseen proportions find their friendship, challenge their beliefs and come to a deeper understanding of each others positions, or something like that.

It does that for while, or tries to. But when you are writing 50,000 words in 30 days, you don't have time to story board properly, and you need to keep going.

I believe it was NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty who said "Whenever you get stuck, just add ninjas."

Well there are no ninjas in my book but there are random side stories, countless deaths, action scenes, cable news punditry, assassinations and even a damn near sex scene.

I didn't set out to write a book with poop jokes and party scenes, I set out to write one about Paschal's Wager or Humanism or something like that....but as I said, you have to keep writing.

And at 4 a.m. on a Saturday when you haven't talked to your wife much in days and you have a couple drinks and the keys are all kinda blurry and you don't know whether the character should make yet another theological reference or not, sometimes, shit breaks down.

But it is a novel by minimum standards. And I wrote it.

I wrote a novel.

It has a name. It has a beginning, middle(ish) and end. It has more than 50,000 words. I failed at Nano once before in earnest though I started it twice. So to finally win after all that effort was great.

It takes self discipline and in my case mass support to get done. My mom and my sister Karyn (also winners this year at NaNo) were major factors in me winning as watching their word counts increase was motivation. Karyn got me into a chat with some friends on AIM Instant Messenger (I know I was surprised it was around still too) and they were all a help. Word battles every night.

Among non-nanoers, my wife Kelli was a huge support not just in congratulating every little milestone I mentioned, but also in tolerating my going into a shell for 30 straight days.

Also, my facebook community of friends was also a help. Bre and others provided support and chat distractions when needed.

Let me wrap it up with my assessment of the month.

NaNoWriMo is great for many things. When you really buy in, it's a motivating tool to help you really write a novel. You are in trouble if you go into this thinking you'll write an epic tale that's ready for publish on Dec. 1, you won't. You really really must turn off the inner editor and keep pushing.

When it's over, if you're like me this year, you won't have the Great American Novel. You might not even have a good novel. But you'll have a novel.

I want to write a great novel one day. Maybe with a LOT of work, this one could be it's foundation, but I'm not holding out hope. But the first step to writing The Great American Novel, is writing a novel.

I can now say with pride that I have done that, if nothing else.

And when it was over I got to see this little ditty.
http://www.viddler.com/NaNoWinner/videos/3/



Final note:
Somehow despite a month of sitting firmly on my arse, I lost 3-4 pounds. Woot.