Hello stranger. Remember me? I used to be someone you saw or heard from now and again. You may have been wondering where I've been. Or, you may have been rejoicing in the freedom of not having to read, listen to or deal with me and my stupid crap. If the latter, well, screw you. But if you're actually interested - here's the secret to my almost complete absence from your life this last month: NaNoWriMo.
Wondering what on earth that is (and feeling too lazy to exercise the 5 muscles or whatever it would take to click on that hyperlink)? Well, it's a completely ridiculous global challenge that asks participants to write the first draft of a novel, from scratch, during the 30 days of November. That's 50,000 words in 30 days. If you divide the total number of words required by the number of days in the month, and divide again by the average typing speed, what you're left with is...pretty much no social life whatsoever for the whole damn month.
I first heard of NaNo when I stumbled across the book that started it all, No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty, when I lived in Edinburgh in 2007. I thought it was a cool idea, but it was already part-way through November so I didn't do it that year. And being the very driven, goal-oriented, disciplined person I am, what I immediately did was to forget all about its existence. Two years later, I found the book in a bookstore in London. It looked vaguely familiar, so I bought and (re-)read it. Once again, my timing was impeccable, as it was already part-way through November. A great excuse to procrastinate for another year - hurrah!
l ran out of excuses this year, though, so I duly committed myself to the ridiculous and almost-impossible task of writing the first draft of a novel - with no plot, characters or outlining done in advance - in 30 days. The first week was awful. My boss left the country, dumping on me the organisation of an event in Nigeria in a week's time. I was crazy busy trying to sort that out, and ended up having to go to Nigeria myself for five very hectic days. I was thousands of words behind the daily target and utterly exhausted, but as I had a friend signed up to do it with me this year, I reluctantly resisted the urge to scrap the whole idea and start saying yes to invitations to meet real live people who didn't live on my computer screen.
The second week, too, was awful. That was when I realised that the NaNoWriMo philosophy of writing fast, without planning, and for quantity over quality, was resulting in my story turning out to be - how to put this delicately? - a big steaming pile of crap. It was (and still is, thanks to the 'no editing' rule) without any semblance of artistic merit by even the loosest of standards. It had no perceptible plot, nothing linking one moment to the next, except for the semi-coherent narrative ramblings of my main character, and no potentially redeemable features of any description. Even worse than all this, was the realisation that I needed another 25,000 words to stretch this tale out to the required length. Enter the third week.
So the first week was awful, and the second was also awful. The third, however, was...actually it was awful too. By now I was really feeling the lack of a social life. Hitting the required word target meant allocating about two hours per day to the novel, which essentially meant not being able to do anything else apart from work, commute, eat, shower and sleep. By now I hated my main character, and was getting frustrated at his complete inability to do anything remotely interesting. At the suggestion of a friend, I wrote in a scene where a dwarf dressed as a clown was thrown through the glass window of the bar in which my main character and his friends were drinking. That would surely spice up his life and force him to finally do something that would pique the interest of a reader. Instead, as the dwarf clown stood up - uninjured - and ran out of the bar, and crowds gathered outside to look at the mayhem, my characters simply picked up their beers, squeezed past the gawping crowd, and wandered off down the street. I hated them.
For this, I was forsaking nights out with friends, use of social media sites, the purchase and preparation of fresh food, and even the joy of reading a published book written by someone who wasn't the talentless loser that it was increasingly evident that I am. The weight of churning out pages and pages of rubbish each day was wearing me down. I was, however, determined to finish. And once I hit 35,000 words at the end of this week, I began to see light at the end of the tunnel. Cue week four, where I wrote like a maniac. I had a flash of inspiration that led to something remotely akin to a plot development. I started typing well above my required word count each day, and was finally seeing some progress. Once I reached 40,000 words, it was pretty much smooth sailing up until the final few thousand, where I had to find a way to end the damn thing.
Which I have now finally done, earlier tonight in fact: two days earlier than the deadline. Oh the relief. The sweet, glorious relief. There's a spot on the NaNo website where you upload your novel in order to get the final wordcount verified. If it's at least 50,000 words then you get the tag 'winner' appended to your profile, as well as access to all these blog badges I've been posting here. Am I aware that they're cheesy and ugly? Of course I am. But I don't care.
I'm proud of the fact that I stuck with something difficult, and saw it out to the end. My "life's too short to waste time being miserable" philosophy has served me well over the years, but has tended to mean that I bail out of commitments that seem like they're too much effort for too little reward. This time I didn't run away, and I'm very proud of myself. You should be proud of me too. Unless you're one of those people I mentioned earlier, who have failed to notice the absence of my delightful and uplifting presence in your life. In which case I reiterate: screw you! I'm a novelist, now, so I'm allowed to be self-centred and obnoxious, and to pass it off as the caprice of a creative personality. So there.
