Here’s one final guest post on NanoWriMo. Good luck to everyone in the homestretch of getting your novel finished by the end of November!
Why I’m handwriting my Nano Novel
by Kevin Mackey
I came upon the strange acronym, NaNoWriMo, one week before the end of October this year. It was used by some forum members on EditorUnleashed. They were considering “doing NaNoWriMo” this year.
“Google, don’t fail me now”, was my immediate thought. In the usual fashion, 0.06 seconds later I had over 2 million results and discovered this had been going on for 10 years, involves writing a 50,000 word novel in the month of November and its origins were across the San Francisco Bay from me. Clearly I need to get out more.
Two days later, at a Barnes & Noble store near where I work, I bought their last copy of “No Plot? No Problem!” by Chris Baty. He is the originator of this, self-confessed, insane idea.
Insanity is catching and I found myself, with two days to go before November, thinking I might join in.
I had a vague idea for a novel, one character, an environment into which to drop him and the first two sentences. That and a lot of terror. What would happen if I failed?
In the end, I decided nothing would happen—and that I wouldn’t fail anyway. I told my partner, my sister and a friend in Ireland of my plan. Shame is a powerful thing.
I allowed one concession to ensure that I would go through with this. I decided to write the novel by hand. This, for the simple reason that, on a computer doing something for myself, my attention span shatters like fine crystal on ceramic floor tiles. Ask me one day about my home in France for the backstory to that simile.
Writing the novel by hand gave me an excuse to use my favorite Waterman fountain pen, to buy new ink cartridges and new writing pads. And so I began.
I have the NaNoWriMo calendar image, created by Kriska on deviantArt, as the desktop wallpaper on my Mac. This serves, during my day job, as a reminder of how far behind I have been from time to time this month. The reminder then serves to drive me back to my writing desk. There I discovered another reason for “kicking it old school”. A growing stack of pages—it is now more than three-quarters of an inch thick—is a far more tactile pleasure and measure of achievement than the endlessly scrolling window on a computer screen.
I have 10,000 words to go to reach my goal, and less than five days in which to write them. Still, 40,000 words is the most I have ever written in such a short amount of time.
The act of writing is the getting words down on paper. Then comes the craft of writing, the “slashing and burning” as a friend of mine in the UK describes her writing process. But the words have to be there to start with.
Kevin Mackey blogs at http://kevin.mackey.name/blog
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
wow, writing a novel by hand for NaNoWriMo! You are ambitious.
Not ambitious, just not knowing enough not to try. I now have just under 45,000 written. I do believe I will finish.
Typing the resulting story into Scrivener or some other tool will constitute the first of many revision exercises.
And I will have to get the nib of my fountain pen repaired.
You. Wrote. It. By. Hand.
Now I know NaNo has truly fried my brain — I must not be reading this right. It’s hard enough to write 50,000 words on a computer, but by hand? I’d still be writing into the 22nd Century, and even then, no one would be able to decipher my handwriting.
I wish you luck!
Nice article, Kevin. Now you’ve got me wanting a Waterman fountain pen. Your plan might actually be brilliant. The act of going from paper to pixels will be a wonderful method for editing. You’ll have all those little “notes to self” out in the margins to guide you. That’s harder to pull off on a computer. I do sort of miss the pen and ink way. ~jon
@Becke Davis/Martin
Who said anything about deciphering? I may have to make up a whole new story as I type what I have written. :-}
Still, I have found writing on a page a lot more satisfying than typing on a computer—at least for this exercise.
@Jon
Don’t blame me if you fall into a fountain pen addiction. I know what it’s like to have one (expensive).
Yes, I do have “notes to self” in the margins (how did you know?) that I have made as I went along. They are already useful and I suspect will become more so when I type up the completed thing.
Thank goodness for the “Lorem Ipsum” generator so I don’t have to type this just to have it verified.
Well, I finished the first draft of my NaNo story, but now comes the scary part of editing and revising it. I looked through it today, and it was an eye-opener.
I made some really stupid mistakes, but that’s all part of NaNo. The baby that was a boy around Nov. 3 changed to a girl around Nov. 10 and I forgot to correct one section about that.
And in another section, it was afternoon but a full moon was glowing! Oh well, easy to fix, but frustrating!
50,176 words. I’m done. I am now going to sleep for a week!
One of the largest tasks ahead of me is breaking the durned thing into chapters. Tools and technology, don’t fail me now.
I am as happy as a cat with two tails. :-}
Congrats Kevin!
Fabulous to write by hand (and did you count every single word to get at your total? I’d need another month just for that task).
I write a lot by hand, and did write some of NaNo stuff in longhand, then input late at night.
I like my MontBlanc and Ticonderogas :^)
Peace, Linda
Thanks Linda. The trick, I discovered, is to count each page, put the total at the end of the page and maintain a running total on the top of each page.
As a verification, for purposes of sanity, I checked the approximate total a number of times while writing. Approximately 300 words per page should have given me 166.66666 pages for 50,000 words. The page on which I wrote “The End” was page 167, so it added up nicely.
Yikes! Math!
~jon
>>But the words have to be there to start with.
Those sound like very good words to write by.
Wow!! What a feat!!! I am considering doing NaNo next year. (well, this year, 2009) When ever I do write, if it’s not something that has to be done in school or something like that, it is always in Pages on my Mac, like you, but I do love to write by hand. My handwriting can sometimes be quite indecipherable, even by me, but oh well, it’s that much more fun to decode it later! :PPI love to write in my awesome Moleskine by hand, and have written a few short stories in them, but I don’t think that I could ever write a whole novelby hand. The closest thing to that which I would actually do, and it is very possible that I will do, is to use a typewriter. I LOVE the feeling of typing on such an analog medium, and sound of the letters being punched away, et cetera. I know that they’re a little hard to come by now-a-days, but they do exist…much, much geeky writing-fun ahead! :D