Nov 16 2008
NaNoWriMo can kill your writing career.
I was blissfully reading Idiotic Plot Twists over on the NaNoWriMo site, reading about fun stuff like Kosmostar’s characters who’ve been having arguments about whether or not the food replicators make “real” food, and there have been some changes in both their sexual orientations, and the occassional hero status. Good days. That isn’t what this post is about.
You see, after that, as I was clicking around the site, I saw someone’s word count. This person has currently written over 600,000 words–and I believe them. I saw someone else who has over 300,000 words, and there are any number of people who do NaNo who have incredibly high word counts–and they’re not lying. They really are writing 15,000 or 30,000 words every day.
Jealous? I’m not, and here’s why. I have won NaNo before, and I know the tsunami of editing that is the inevitable backlash of NaNo. I’m thinking about my own story and the time it’s going to take to edit properly. I’m thinking about some of the editing I’m still working through from the last NaNoWriMo.
The slush piles at publishers are filled by well-intentioned people who have accomplished the feat of finishing a novel, but 99.9% of them will never have their manuscripts published because they haven’t crafted a salable story.
High word count is great, but it’s not going to impress anyone at Random House.
Crafted. That’s the key word, here. So, if you’re typing as fast as your fingers can go, God bless you. Sometimes it is better to have a larger novel so that when you cut it down, there’s plenty of interconnectedness. However, if you want to beat the odds and be properly published, you’re going to have to spend the other 11 months out of the year editing. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
There’s a point at which NaNoWriMo stops being a kick in the pants and it becomes something that can kill your potential writing career dead if you let it.
Very true! I write about 2,000 words a day. If I wrote anymore than that, my kids wouldn’t get fed!