LessFuss Design

Seeing as I can barely muster more than two or three blog posts a month, it seems bonkers that I’ve signed up to ‘30 days and nights of literary abandon’ with National Novel Writing Month , in which the improbable target is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words during November. NaNoWriMo as it’s known is not about writing the next ‘Great novel’ but about writing the next ‘Great Frantic Novel’. The idea is to liberate you from the painful processes of character development and plot distillation that ‘real novelists who dawdle on and on’ have to go through, and just scrape through to the finish:

The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.NaNoWriMo website

The more you read, the more NaNoWriMo comes across as two fingers up to people who take prose fiction seriously. I mean, get this – in answer to the FAQ Who is NaNoWroMo for?:

You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.NaNoWriMo website

NaNoWriMo uses language that my old MA Creative Writing tutors would have frowned very gravely at indeed. ‘Laughably awful prose’, ‘don’t obsess over quality’, ‘build without tearing down’. It was fourteen years ago that I did my MA in Creative Writing (At the University of East Anglia, Norwich), and while I can’t honestly say that the experience helped me in any way to be a better writer (the majority of the writing for my final piece was written before the course started), neither did it put me off wanting to write. And what I want to write is something decent, and not something that should be laughed at. (well, not unintentionally, anyway.)

When I became aware of NaNoWriMo I thought it might give me the impetus to do something creative again, and while I’m in two minds as to whether it’s really the right thing to be doing (seeing as I would prefer to write a decent novel rather than a frantic novel full of laughable prose), it is at the very least getting me to think about writing again. Which is a good thing.

Nobody seems to have told the NaNoWriMo writers on Twitter that it’s a bit of a piss-take though. There’s the odd ‘OMG WTF am I doing I have no idea what to write yet!’, but there’s also some folks who are scarily organised about what they’re going to do, enthusiastically discussing the finer points of their convoluted plots, and who are clearly taking it more seriously than the organisers perhaps intended.

The prose-fest starts on 1 November, so there’s still time to sign up if you fancy taking up the challenge – either seriously or as a bit of fun. (Although I’d hardly call knocking out 50,000 words in a month fun).

If you do sign up, be sure to look up your Regional Group, where you’ll find other NaNoWriMo contestants in your area. Some plan write ins and meet ups, so as well as writing a novel in a month, you could get to meet new people too. My local group (Norfolk UK) have their first meeting in Norwich this Saturday at the Millenium Library, and I’m looking forward to meeting them.

Maybe, if you’re in the Norwich area and have a frantic novel in you, I’ll see you there too?