NaNoWriMo Update: The Halfway Point

(Or Fifty Percent Over, Ninety Percent Shit.)

Participants in NaNoWriMo are probably all too aware that their month of finger-numbing drivel production is half over.

You should be over 25,000 words by now: if not, you'd best step up if you want one of those shiny web icons.

Heather Dudley completed 50k in 12 days, and yet according to her comments here seems to have a reasonable perspective on it.

Mike Toot is a shade under 31k, Simon Haynes is just under 29k; on target, guys, hope it's not shit.

NaNo's participants this year have produced 491 million words, in fifteen days. (60 million of those are adverbs.)

One one level, this is an absurd number - unless you're a slush reader for Harlequin Mills & Boon, you probably won't read this quantity in your lifetime.

But, if you factor in NaNo's estimated 75,000 participants, this is an average of 6,500 words. Guess a lot of people are finding out the hard way that writing requires work.

(I'm becoming convinced that NaNoWriMo is actually a covert distributed experiment, testing the Infinite Monkeys theory. They need more bananas.)

Reason #5: I'll Just Pad This Out

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing, #10: "Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."

Padding: When you run out of ideas, but keep on writing. It's also something insecure rockstars do to their crotches. The fluff covering the flaccid.

There are only two reasons to pad your writing:

You've got a target wordcount and a deadline you can't meet

You're bored/stuck with the section you're working on, so you digress

They both equate to:

You have contempt for your readers.

If your story is short on wordcount, that's because it's a short story.

Reason #4: That's a Lot of Words

NaNoWriMo aims for a novel of 50k words, but they admit this more of a novella (~175 pages). A more typical novel is around 90k+. Stephen King routinely goes over 200k.

That's a lot of words. How long would it take you to write 50-90k words, even if you (shudder) aren't concerned about quality?

Georges Simenon, legendary Belgian mystery writer and legendary pantsman, could write 60-80 pages a day. He published 425 novels in his lifetime, 2-3 per month, and still had time to nail 10,000 women (so he claims).

You are, however, not Georges Simenon, much as you might've liked to be.

NaNo's need to average 1,666.666 words per day. You probably haven't written that much since your high school English exam. Realistically, you're going to need 2-3 hours per day to maintain this. 90 hours over a month, that's two working weeks.

If you have that kind of time, you need a better hobby. Even if you make it, you've just worked your ass off to produce the first draft of half a novel. Whoopee.