NaNoWriMo no no no?

Contrary to some sensible advice online, I’m doing NaNoWriMo and am up to 10,000 words.

I started a day late. I posted a Salon article on Facebook to say what a bad idea it was because the last thing the world needs is more trashy novels. Some more positive people said it was a good spur to get the words out as long as you remembered it was only a first draft. The Salon article said that in December agents and publishers are buried under an avalanche of NaNoWriMo unpolished first drafts (and this was back in 2010, it’s bigger now). One lady on Facebook replied that she has done it for eight years and had seven novels taken by publishers, AFTER polishing them.

So, I decided to try it. And it is indeed a good spur. I’m not a natural novelist and I suspect this story won’t run to the whole 50,000 words but as long as I get to the end of it, I’m happy. It will probably be a novella of about 30,000 words. Maybe I’ll keep going and write a second novella just to complete the word count making my own scheme NaTwoNovellasWriMo.

I read somewhere, long ago, that to break an old habit or acquire a new one takes a month. So if one produces 1700 words a day for a month one will have the habit of doing it every day. All those self-publish and make millions advisors say you should bash out 10,000 words a day, a novel a week, in a series of 700 novels about the adventures of Burt the Barbarian or whoever, selling them of 99p on Kindle until you’re rich. If everyone tried that (and I sometimes think everyone is, there are 20,000 new books a week on Kindle apparently) the world would be awash with novels. And…er…it is.