NaNo and the New Friday Feature?

I know I've mentioned this in the comments, but I'm pledged to NaNoWriMo this month for what I hope will be my own 50,000 words in November. This year, something like 90,000 folks signed up for the free, bragging-rights challenge. Today, our cumulative, self-reported word count is now up to 295 million!

Some people wonder about the quality of work generated by such an exercise. I understand, but quality's not the primary goal here, though flashes of brilliance always occur. The goal is to get involved, excited, and committed to this unique act of creation. If nothing else, the multitudes involved become more passionate readers, and that helps us all. And because I despise my first drafts, churning through them with a cheery scrum at my back is preferable to solitary misery. The MS my agent is trying to sell now is one whose first draft I finished during my first NaNo, and I hope to repeat the feat. NaNo demands that writers loosen up enough to be willing to generate garbage, but, outrunning your headlights and speeding across the chasms allows for unexpected wonders to happen, too. One feature this year is a weekly pep talk from a pro to our inbox. Here's the first:

When you sit down to begin that novel of yours, the first thing you might want to do is toss a handful of powdered napalm over both shoulders---so as to dispense with any and all of your old writing teachers, the ones whose ghosts surely will be hovering there, saying such things as, "Adverbs should never be...", or "A novel is supposed to convey...", et cetera. Enough! Ye literary bureaucrats, vamoose!

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works. Ah, but how can you know if it's working? The truth is, you can't always know (I nearly burned my first novel a dozen times, and it's still in print after 35 years), you just have to sense it, feel it, trust it. It's intuitive, and that peculiar brand of intuition is a gift from the gods. Obviously, most people have received a different package altogether, but until you undo the ribbons you can never be sure.

As the great Nelson Algren once said, “Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.” Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

A topic is necessary, of course; a theme, a general sense of the nexus of effects you'd like your narrative to ultimately produce. Beyond that, you simply pack your imagination, your sense of humor, a character or two, and your personal world view into a little canoe, push it out onto the vast dark river, and see where the currents take you. And should you ever think you hear the sound of dangerous rapids around the next bend, hey, hang on, tighten your focus, and keep paddling---because now you're really writing, baby! This is the best part.

It's a bit like being out of control and totally in charge, simultaneously. If that seems tricky, well, it's a tricky business. Try it. It'll drive you crazy. And you'll love it.

Tom Robbins

Shall we declare Fridays a day when we can all post updates about what we've been doing in the comments? That might include very-official things like actually writing works-in-progress or activities related to publishing. And Great! But, as far as I'm concerned, it might also be: mulling over an idea that's still percolating; reading or watching something inspiring (or envy-inducing); researching; keeping a personal journal or blogging; perhaps taking the necessary time and space to clear the cobwebs between efforts; even handling the peskiness of "real-life", so you can clear the decks for writing later. For so many of us, writing demands much but probably doesn't pay the mortgage (yet- stay hopeful). Feel free to stretch the definitions, and tell us what you've done for your writerly self this week.