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Why NaNoWriMo Is Awesome

It’s November again—National Novel Writing Month! And that means it’s time for NaNoWriMo.

The basic idea behind NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word manuscript in just 30 days. You aren’t supposed to do any revising or editing. You are supposed to get your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard every day so you can reach your target word count.

Some people have criticized the program, saying that this style of writing only helps you churn out words, not necessarily a good book. In fact, several book deals have arisen from NaNoWriMo projects—after much revision, of course. No one’s going into this thinking they’ll just start sending out sample chapters in December. Instead, the goal is to create a rough draft that you can continue revising throughout the year (December has become known as National Editing Month, as it follows on the heels of NaNoWriMo).

However, the benefits of participating in a speed-writing endeavor such as NaNoWriMo go beyond the drafting of a manuscript.

How You Can Benefit From NaNoWriMo

1. The goal is word count, not literary value (though if you end up with something publishable, good for you!). For me, this official “permission” to write 50K words of what may be total crap is very freeing. I don’t have to—in fact, can’t—quibble with my editor-brain over which phrasing sounds better, or whether my protagonist would be better off as a tall brunette or a short blond. All I have to do is keep those fingers moving. And surprisingly, what I produced during my last attempt at NaNoWriMo isn’t too bad. TIP: Write without thinking too hard or correcting yourself. Just let the words flow. You’ll polish it all up later.

2. The structure of the program helps participants cultivate a writing habit. I teach my students that the very act of sitting down to write on a regular basis helps train your brain to write more, better, faster. It also helps strengthen your ability to defy emotional reasoning (I really don’t feel like working, so I’m not going to), which in turn encourages discipline. Now I’m getting to experience that truth for myself! It didn’t work out last year, but I’m hopeful for better results this time now that I know what I’m in for. TIP: Choose a time of day you can continue using as writing time once November is over, to stay in the habit.

3. Participating in this effort year after year can ultimately help you become more prolific. Again, you’re training your brain to be creative on a constant basis. It’s essentially practice in churning out a rough draft quickly. You may take another year or more to revise it into something great, but that’s better than spending a year on the rough draft and THEN another few years on the revising. TIP: Don’t let a flood of great ideas distract you from your NaNoWriMo novel. Instead, write them all down someplace safe so you can explore them later—maybe for next year’s NaNoWriMo!

4. A program like NaNoWriMo forces accountability in a fun environment. Many people—including me—have what they feel is a great idea for a book, but can never find the time to work on it, either because they’re truly busy or because they’re afraid. In my case, it’s also because I find it difficult to shut off “editor-brain” and just have fun with the writing! When you do NaNoWriMo, you’re making a more solid commitment than just saying you want to write a book. And you get toys to play with! The NaNoWriMo website offers widgets, an online community (writing partners really help with that accountability factor, and it’s fun to share the experience), a word progress function so you can compare yourself to others, and more. And, since writing a novel can seem so daunting, the idea of committing only 30 days to the effort makes it much less scary. TIP: If you get thrown off track for some reason, don’t give up. Even if you don’t reach the 50,000 word count goal by the end of the month, you’ll still end up with a lot more than the zero you had before you started.

Stay tuned throughout November for updates on my NaNoWriMo 2011 experience. I’ll also be tweeting and posting to Facebook about it. I hope you’ll share your stories with me, too! I’d love to get a conversation going on my Facebook Page, in particular. Or leave a comment here!

Founder of The Writer’s Ally, Ally E. Machate is a bestselling book collaborator, award-winning editor, and expert publishing consultant who loves using her insider knowledge and experience with the publishing industry to lead serious authors toward success. She and her team live to help make great books happen, whether that means showing a writer how to improve a manuscript, get an agent, or self-publish; or coaching an author on growing her platform to sell more books. Since 1999, she has supported hundreds of authors on their publishing journey and takes pride in serving as their books’ best ally.

How to Keep Your Creative Fire Stoked

Ah, the lazy days of summer. As the weather heats up, life slows down a bit. With relish, you whip out that half-finished manuscript and sit in front of your computer. Your iced tea is sweating onto your notes, but you don’t care because you finally have some time to write and that has you feeling pretty great. Your creative fire is burning, baby, burning!

That is, until you realize you’ve been cracking your knuckles and scratching your head for five, fifteen, thirty minutes, and you still haven’t started typing. In fact, the more you stare at that screen, the further from your grasp your story seems to float. With every minute that passes, you feel you have even less to say. Maybe that creative fire isn’t burning so much as it’s smoldering, covered in ash and waiting for you to stoke it back up again.

Creativity is a key component of any writing project, whether you’re writing a self-help book, a treatise on best business practices, or a Great American Novel. The root of the word is “create” after all. But what can you do to keep the creative fire in your gut—the sometimes magical energy you pull from to create your work—burning hot?

The following is a creativity “to do” list I’ve adapted from G.M. Corrigan’s workshop, “Keeping the Sacred Fire: Practical Ideas on ‘Flowmanship.’” He is the author of Chasing Chickens: A Love Story, which you can read in part on his website, www.continentaldivide.us. Thanks, G.M., for sharing this with me.

TO DO:

-Read extensively. It provides range, depth, and color to one’s writing.

-Continually improve your vocabulary and cultivate a love of words.

-Keep a small notebook or recording device handy for observations and other fleeting insights.

-Enjoy unusual people and note character quirks and idiosyncrasies you may want to reproduce in your stories.

-Exercise or engage in some kind of physical outlet. Happy creative souls reside in nurtured bodies (plus exercise is a great stress-beater!).

-Explore a belief in something beyond yourself to cultivate feelings of awe and gain a new perspective.

-Welcome new experiences and activities outside your comfort zone and continually push your boundaries. It’s stimulating.

-Be open to learning techniques from others and ask questions of your fellow writers.

-Seek to learn more about strangers you encounter every day, including at social events, on line at the grocery store, or on the street. You never know where a good idea will come from.

-Learn the left brain particulars of the writing craft.

-Last but not least, cherish solitude. The keeping of the sacred fire is lonesome sometimes, but inspiration often arrives during the silence, when you’re best able to hear it calling.

Get a Unique Edge: Complete Your Rough Draft First

Every writer has his or her own preferred method for writing a book. Some will tell you they write a little every day at various times of day; others sit down when the muse strikes and churn out page after page. It can take months or years to write a book. Some edit as they go along while others like to push through until the end before revising. There’s no right answer. I find there are many reasons why it’s better, though, especially for beginning writers, to complete your rough draft before you begin revising it.

Opening up the creative floodgates and letting the words pour out of you may seem easy at first, but how easy does it feel after 10,000 words, or 40,000? It can be difficult enough to get your characters or argument from point to point without stopping to tweak sentences or reorganize things, which is why new writers tend to begin more books than they finish. If you can use that initial burst of creativity to rough out the entire book, however, you can at least get the bones down before the juice runs out. I see writing as a messier rush of magic and revising as the more meticulous sculpting. You gotta let the magic run its course before you try making sense out of it all.

Stop Signs are Just Suggestions

I’m not alone in this opinion. In fact, a whole movement has grown up around it: ever hear of NaNoWriMo? The idea is to write a 50K word novel in the month of November, and no editing is allowed! You must complete your rough draft, and at a pretty quick pace, too. Editing definitely slows things down. Just try writing at that speed and you’ll see immediately that to maintain the pace (approximately 1,600 words a day), one really can’t pause to revise. Stephen King advises in his memoir On Writing that you shouldn’t even stop to look up definitions or spelling—it’s more important not to interrupt the flow of creation. King suggests using a simple placeholder like brackets or parentheses around a word approximating the meaning you’re looking for. I’d take that one step further and say you could make notes to yourself this way, too, so you can keep writing and have a handy way to spot places you wanted to revise later.

The Forest for the Trees

It’s another truth of writing that you sometimes can’t see what isn’t working until you’ve seen it all the way through. This is especially true in novels, but even with nonficion you may not realize that you haven’t laid the proper foundation for a certain concept until you’re writing that particular chapter (one reason why I advocate for the use of outlines). Waiting to revise until after you complete your rough draft will help your revision be more effective because until you know for sure where your book is headed, you can’t effectively shape your earlier material.

Procrastination Nation

Last but not least, I’ve found that writers (including myself!) sometimes turn to revising before a story is finished as a subconscious, or conscious, method of procrastination. You could spend those same months and years it would take to finish your book rewriting the same chapters over and over again past the point of conscientiousness and into the realm of neuroses. Especially if you feel it’s keeping you from finishing the story, I recommend you complete your rough draft before revising, even if the final chapters are only outlined.

But Don’t Complete Your Rough Draft First In This Case (The Exception)

I can think of only one real exception to this suggested plan of attack: if you feel you’ve totally lost direction and need to rethink the material you’ve written before you can get the ending back on track, then you may want to pause to revise and get your bearings. At this point, I would recommend you make some notes about the decisions you’ve already made and any new decisions you make as you get your house in order. If you find yourself in this situation and haven’t already made an outline, consider writing one: It will serve as a roadmap when you return to writing, and help avoid veering off course in the future. Some writers don’t like outlines because they feel they’re inorganic or somehow stifling, but you can change an outline as you go along to reflect any new developments in your story or new ideas you’ve had for your nonfiction. You needn’t view your outline as confining or set in stone.

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Rather than taking time out from writing your rough draft to revise, why not just make a note to yourself either in-text as suggested previously or in a notebook so you won’t forget your brilliant idea? When I realize I’ve just written something that requires a change earlier on, I make a short note in the text AND jot down lengthier explanations and thoughts in a notebook, then keep moving forward as though I’d already made the necessary change. That way I’m still on the right track with the story or thought, and I’ll remember what needs to be fixed in my early pages when I’m ready to revise.

Do you often find your writing going astray from your initial idea? Is it a happy surprise, or a source of frustration? Tell us about it in the Comments section below!

Q: Do I need a Creative Writing MFA to get my novel published?

Oh how the world of letters has changed. Once upon a time, writers found sponsors in wealthy friends or lovers more politely called “patrons.” Then somewhere along the way writers just became self-supported if they had money and starving artists if they didn’t. But writing was a sort-of gentlemanly pursuit, something done by learned men (and occasionally women) but not something you went to school to learn, specifically. Now, not only are there hundreds of MFA programs out there, there are writing certificates, combined English Lit/Creative Writing MAs, even PhDs in Creative Writing! In every class I teach and at every conference presentation I give, at least one person wants to know how important these degrees are to his or her writing career. “Do I need a Creative Writing MFA to get my novel published?” they ask. The answer is: they can be useful, but they aren’t necessary.

You don’t need an MFA or any other degree, certificate, or award to get published. Just check out the New York Times bestseller list or the shelf in your local bookstore and you’ll find less than a handful of authors who have them (if you’re a fan of genre fiction, you’re even less likely to find accredited authors, since these lofty academic programs primarily focus on literary fiction). However, this fact doesn’t make an advanced degree in writing meaningless.

How a Creative Writing MFA Can Help You

There are many reasons a writer might choose to pursue an MFA or other academic writing program.

Some of my comments on this subject are repeated in this informative Suite 101 article by Bonnie Way. To elaborate, you might choose to pursue a writing degree if:

you’d like to work intensively on your craft with the support of a published writer (your professor) and peers
you think you’d like to teach creative writing at the college level (most four-year schools require MFAs for this)
you’re interested in networking with published authors and other serious writers
you love delving deeper into good literature and debating with other book nerds

Who Cares about Your Degree

With nonfiction, the right degree can make a difference in whether a publisher thinks it can sell your book to the media and to readers. For fiction, it matters less if you have a degree, but having one can help you stand out. To agents and publishers, it means you may have connections via your academic program to other published authors who might give endorsements; it conveys a devotion to writing as a career, thus increasing the possibility that you’ll produce more than just one novel (in other words, that you’re a better long-term investment than a non-degree writer); it gives you more opportunities to teach at universities and notable conferences, which increases your visibility and opens venues for sales.

To readers, though, it means next to nothing. Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. If publishers know readers won’t care, then they won’t care. And readers don’t care if you have a creative writing MFA and fancy letters next to your name. They just want a great read.

Bottom line: Write a well-crafted, engaging story, and no one will care where (or if) you went to school to learn how. But if you’ve been thinking about getting an MFA for reasons beyond getting published, consider the above as nuggets to toss on the scale as you weigh your decision.

Should Your Novel Have a Table of Contents?

Beginning authors have lots of questions. And why wouldn’t they, when so much about book publishing involves unspoken rules? Maybe you’re wondering about some of those rules, like, should fiction books have a table of contents? And if so, what should it look like?

Agents and editors have somewhat different expectations for submissions of various types. If you’re submitting a nonfiction book proposal, for example, you better have included a Table of Contents (better yet, an annotated TOC or a set of chapter summaries). But should fiction books have a Table of Contents? They can, but it isn’t necessary.

Note that I said it isn’t necessary—not that it’s wrong, or breaking the rules, to include a Table of Contents if you wish.

How do you decide? Well, for one thing, I recommend including a Table of Contents in your novel (or memoir, for that matter) if you’re using anything more creative than “Chapter 12” type headings. If your chapters have descriptive names, including the TOC in your manuscript can help agents and editors get a sense of what’s in your novel at a glance. It’s important that your chapter titles match the tone of the book, however. Don’t make the mistake of using gimmicky or cute chapter titles in a serious literary work or a dark and stormy thriller. It’s just confusing and weird. In most cases, it’ll hurt your first impression.

Also, if you’re going to use unique chapter titles and then include them in a Table of Contents, be sure you only send that TOC page to agents when they ask for your complete manuscript. If you’re asked to send in the first 50 pages and a synopsis, the TOC won’t add anything particularly important, and you’re just wasting a page slot that could be taken up by another page of your story. They’ll still see the fun chapter titles you used for those included in your sample excerpt; that’s enough to give a taste, which is exactly what they’re looking for in a sample chapters or a partial manuscript.

All of that said, most published novels and memoirs don’t have a Table of Contents. Most just number their chapters and leave it at that. It’s a time-tested approach you can feel comfortable using, so don’t feel you need to work extra hard to come up with anything fancier.

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Why NaNoWriMo Is Awesome

How You Can Benefit From NaNoWriMo