Brian A. Paul

In a word, Failure. This is not surprising, it has happened every year I’ve made an attempt. It just seems like things go sideways in November and this year was no exception. Without going into gory detail we had some pretty significant family tragedy around here. Life comes at you whether you want it to or not. This just gives me that much more respect for all those people who have managed to finish a full length novel regardless of the other challenges they’ve had to overcome in the process of doing so.

The challenge of Nanowrimo is to write something that might be more clearly described as a novella. The word count target is 50,000. As a point of reference, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has a word count of 76,944. As anyone who has read the Harry Potter series can tell you, each book is a bit longer than the last. The final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows weighs in a bit higher at 198,227 words.

Keep in mind that one point of Nanowrimo is to get the 50,000 words written regardless of quality, cohesive story-telling, etc. That’s a far cry from writing a polished publishable novel that someone will actually print, much less something that will sell to readers.

My congratulations go out to all Nanowrimo participants whether they achieved their goal or not. At least you put yourself out there and gave it a try. Better that than giving up before you ever started.

For those of you who do not know, ‘NaNoWriMo‘ stands for National Novel Writing Month. The month in question would be November, just two short weeks away.

In brief, the idea is to produce a 50,000 word short novella, with little consideration for quality of work, between the first and last days of November. It’s something akin to running a marathon. Just get something, anything done. You can always alter, fix, repair, and rewrite after November 30.

I first came across NaNoWriMo in 2004, signed up and failed to produce even a single paragraph. Come 2005, I gamely committed myself to writing again and once again failed. 2006, failure (but I got a whole 2 pages down.)

It’s a cool thing and a cool community. I’m impressed that this many people are publicly setting for themselves a very difficult goal. I love reading, and I love that this many people are trying so very hard to add to the body of literature in the world.

Will I give it another shot this year? I don’t know. Time is already a pretty scarce commodity these days. I’ll just have to see how things go over the next 2 weeks.