Sunday, May 11, 2008
Intro and Mini-NaNo
I’m Holly Thompson and over the next six months I’ll be contributing to the SWET Weblog. I’m one of the Ws in SWET, a writer of fiction and occasionally poetry. My novel Ash was published by Stone Bridge Press and my picture book The Wakame Gatherers was recently published by Shen’s Books. I am currently at work on a second novel for adults, a short story collection, two middle-grade/YA novels and various picture books for children. I teach creative writing at Yokohama City University and am the Regional Advisor of the Tokyo chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, so I aim to post on all sorts of topics related to writing for adults, young adults and children, as well as teaching writing.
For starters, I thought I’d share my recent experiences with a mini-NaNo—that’s short for NaNoWriMo, and that’s short for National Novel Writing Month, which officially runs from November 1 to November 30. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word novel in a single month. Begun in 1999 by a group of just 21 writers in San Francisco, NaNoWriMo had over 100,000 participants in 2007. Now with a full website, fundraising arms and a Young Writers Program, NaNoWriMo is becoming a global phenomenon. NaNoWriMo has spawned related events such as NaNoEdMo (goal of 50 hours of novel editing in one month); NaNoMangO (goal of 30 pages of sequential art in one month); NaPlWriMo (goal of writing a play in one month). Recently in Japan a writers group I belong to decided to try a mini-NaNo. Since most of us have jobs, families and myriad other obligations, we couldn’t commit to 50,000 words, but instead decided to challenge each other to write 10,000 words of new fiction in the month of April. Some of us set specific goals such as 10,000 words of a novel-in-progress; others opted for 10,000 words of short stories; a poet set a goal of 4 new poems in the month; and a translator jumped in with a higher word-count goal.
This was my first experience attempting to sustain an approach of quantity over quality. My usual plodding method of writing fiction is to write new material, then edit, write more new material, then edit. When I am able to write daily (i.e. when on break from university), I might write new pages one day and spend the next day or two revising before writing more new material. But with a NaNo the emphasis is on output, on generating new material only and NOT editing. At first I struggled with this approach and kept to my usual methods, which of course meant I had to put in far more time to come up with the required number of words per week. As I became busier with the start of university classes, however, I gave up my self-editing, and followed the NaNoWriMo doctrine of “no deleting.”
Participants in the mini-NaNo posted word counts weekly and gave a general accounting of the work that had been completed. The lonely business of writing fiction was suddenly a team effort; we cheered each other on via e-mail group messages. This encouragement and the healthy spark of competition served to motivate me to tackle my novel even at the end of exhausting teaching days. And because I was concerned more with output than with quality, I censored myself less and experimented more. The result was surprising to me. By the end of the month I was pleased to have nearly reached the 10,000 word-count goal and had written through a particularly difficult part of my novel-in-progress, solving a plot complication that had dogged me for months.
I’ve always been interested in NaNoWriMo and have long wanted to take part, but anyone who teaches in a Japanese university knows that November is a busy, often grueling, month. The mini-NaNo was perfect for me. My writers group has opted to take the month of May off then try another mini-NaNo in June. I aim to edit April’s writing during May, then write full speed ahead again in June. And who knows…maybe by November I’ll be ready for the full NaNoWriMo. Or JaNoWriMo in January. Or JulNoWriMo. Or AugNoWriMo…