50,000 words. In one month. Have fun!
That’s the premise of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), a “fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.”
You start writing like crazy on November 1. And try to keep going . . . and going and going . . . until the great & magical word-counting wizard behind the curtain says you’ve reached the goal: a 50,000-word novel by midnight, November 30.
So here’s the question:
Will you be a plotter or a plunger?
You’ve heard, I’m sure, the famous advice given by E.L. Doctorow:
Writing is like driving at night. You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Perhaps you also saw a brief interview with Philip Roth (in AARP Magazine, July/August 2006), where he admitted, answering a question from interviewer John F Baker about how well Roth’s great books resulted in conveying what Roth had in mind when the work was started:
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn – an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.
Roth goes on to suggest: “Chance and staying power. That’s the hand the imagination is dealt.”
True, some do drive only by virtue of those headlights. But I’ve found that the more experienced the writer, the less they think (or can or wish to talk in detail about) their real methods. In contrast, emerging successful writers do tend to use outlines, and plan more thoroughly, and think more consciously about the architectural design of their works.
How ’bout you? Planning to plunge into the icy waters of November’s NaNoWriMo novel without a solid outline for your novel?
Planning to head down that foggy highway guided only by your headlights (and if your old car is like mine, one of the headlights is out and the other is a little dim)?
I like this advice from an SF writer, Ruth Nestvold, a finalist for Tiptree and Sturgeon awards, writing here in a 2005 article titled “True Facts About the Art and Craft of Writing”:
The wonderful thing about that [Doctorow] quote is that it can be understood nearly any way you want. . . . But for those who write like me, always a little ahead of yourself, the headlights are also a great metaphor, since they open up the path ahead of me as I proceed. And I see no problem with knowing what my destination is—even people who drive at night usually know where they’re going.
One of the big differences between us is that whether I can see the road or not, I have usually taken a long look at the map before I set off.
Now that’s good advice!
