Crapwriters Unite!

Hands up! Who’s doing NaNoWriMo this year?

Oh! Oh! Oh! Me! Me! Meeeeee! Yes, I’m herewith committing to starting and, more importantly, completing this year’s National Novel Writing Month, aka, NaNoWriMo. For those of you unfamiliar with this annual challenge, the object is to write a novel in 30 days, or 50,000 words total. Easy peasy, right?

Here’s an excerpt from the NaNoWriMo website:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, 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.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Here’s where embracing the Austin WriterGrrls mantra of “Dare to Suck” will come in handy. There’s no room here for your inner perfectionist to be the boss, no room for your controlling muse to hit you with writer’s block, and no room for your conscientious (and insidious) editor to redline every thought. NaNoWriMo is just wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am crammin’ and slammin’ words on the page. One word after the other, one thought after the other, one page after the other. You get it, right? Output, output, output.

Crapwriters, unite!

My Inner Perfectionist is snickering right now. She’s taunting me with comments like these: Oh you think so, do you? You hardly got off the ground the last time you tried tried to turn me off (four years ago). You can’t go an entire 30 days without going back through and editing and rewriting and editing some more. Can’t do it. You’re bound to fail because mostly you suck at sucking. Good luck there, Wanna-be-crapwriter. You don’t know HOW to suck.

Okay, there’s much more to NaNoWriMo than writing crap, but now that I have your attention, are you ready to write? I know that pounding out 50k words is much easier said than done, but daring to write a crap-filled first draft will be my goal for November. I hope it’s yours too, because though we talk crap, the results of this experience will produce a whole lot more of a story that IS NOT crap. If you want to join me in my new crapwriting venture, please “buddy” me at the NaNoWriMo site: I’m listed as good2bqueen.

Best of luck, crapwriters.

©2008 K. Jayne Cockrill