The blogs and Twitter are a buzz with people announcing their NaNoWriMo status. It’s nice to see some many writers jump on board. Me, however, will be keeping my distance. You see, I tried NaNoWriMo-ing a few years ago and failed completely. I’m sure if you were to do a quick search you would come across my NaNoWriMo posts. By the time the month was over, I was left with only two thoughts:
- Wow, that was hard.
- Wow, what I wrote sucks.
Writing however many words you need to a day is no easy tasks. If you miss a day or two you will quickly fall behind and will find it impossible to catch back up. But what really did it for me was the quality of the work I produced. It sucks. Hard. I was going to use NaNoWriMo to write a rough draft of my novel, but none of it was usable. There isn’t a single thing in that NaNoWriMo mess that made it in to my real first draft. If anything, NaNoWriMo taught me what NOT to write.
If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, fantastic. But to me, writing is a marathon not a sprint.