NaNoWriMo has Landed.
Tags: NaNoWriMo, Writing, Writing Challenge, Productivity, Writing Tips

NaNoWriMo has Landed.

You don’t plan on submitting that draft next month, do you?

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

It’s that time of year again! Pumpkin spice lattes are out, and gingerbread lattes are in.

My stupid ‘Writer at Work’ stickers in my Redbubble shop that I made 7 years ago are selling like hotcakes.

Cafes are full of people pecking away on their computers and as I look out among them I can only wonder how many are working on their NaNoWriMo manuscripts, and I hope a lot of them are.

My social feeds are full of people encouraging one another to push harder and more sharing their word counts and story plots and ‘should my character do this or this’ questions.

I actually love this part of the year for all of the reasons above. I love seeing all the writers come out in force and push each other to put their creations on paper. To write that book they’ve had bouncing around in their heads all year, or longer. To accomplish something great, especially this year, of all years, because this year f*cking sucks monster monkey balls.

Every day this year has ended with me bitching about needing a drink so stiff I could blow it, and so far no drink has been stiff enough, but NaNo is definitely a good distraction to the current climate.

Now, back to the topic of NaNo specifically. Will I be participating? Not really. I won’t be posting word counts everyday and striving to create a 50k word manuscript by the end of the month, but I will be writing. I’ve spent years working on a novel that’s now done and I’ve been querying it since October of last year to publishers and agents. I’m currently sitting on about 69 rejections. I’ve stopped submitting for now because that’s a hell of a number to stop on.

Also because I know that next month will be a terrible time to submit a novel to anyone, agent or publisher. Instead I’ll be working on an anthology submission and re-working my novel until I feel like its safe to submit again.

Why?

NaNoWriMo.

I know I said I love this time of year, and I do, I love the passion NaNo brings out in people, but I hate the aftermath. Once November ends and the clock ticks over to December 1st, all hell breaks loose and I hate NaNo, because a massive number of participants start submitting their NaNo garbage scripts to agents and publishers.

Yes, I called them garbage scripts, because that is what they are. That 50k you end up with at the end of the month? That big pile of words you agonized over all month, that you bled over and cried over and pushed through the night to complete?

It’s garbage.

G A R B A G E

There is a tiny, minuscule number of writers who will walk out of NaNo with a publishing contract, and good for them, but the rest of you? Garbage.

No, you should not submit that script to anyone professional, and no, you should not throw it up on Amazon as a self published book next month either, because your writing is horrible. Your plot has holes. Your characters need more development. The story should probably be longer, depending on genre. Your grammar would make a 3rd grader blush. Your word vomit is not public ready.

The point of NaNoWriMo is to make you sit your procrastinating a$$ down in a chair and word-vomit out that novel idea onto paper, and what you have on paper at the end of November is not a novel, it is a very rough draft of what may become a proper novel one day.

At the end of November it is a hunk of coal that you must now spend the rest of the year, or multiple years, shredding into a billion pieces and putting back together until it turns into a diamond worthy of cover letters, submissions and rejections.

Yet so many people don’t understand this part of the process. Next month agents and publishers will be swamped with NaNo submissions which is why I am taking a submission break starting on December 1st. I don’t want my work to be immediately shoved into the garbage pile because it’s assumed to be a NaNoBullshit script.

I’ve been told by some that a lot of agents don’t even read through the submissions they get at this time of year, because so many of them are NaNoWordVomits.

I can’t wait for everyone to be fired up and finish their NaNo manuscripts, but those scripts are not submission or self-publishing ready. They’re far from it. When the clock ticks midnight and the deadline hits, its time to take a short break to give your fingers and your brain some rest, but then its time to re-read your mess and attack it with a red pen.

Shred it with that red pen and get read to re-write it half a dozen times. Then maybe it’ll be ready to let your loved ones and less loved ones read through it. Then it’s time to attack it again with a red pen to fix the grammar this time. Then maybe, just maybe it’ll be time to write up a synopsis and a query letter and start sending it out to agents.

But please, whatever you do, don’t submit that big steamy pile of word vomit next month. It’s not ready but it will be after some more months of hard work.