Josh Getzler
So NaNoWriMo is coming to an end. Thousands of lawyers, barristas, stay-at-home moms, teachers, chefs, students and financial analysts who woke up early and went to bed late every day for the last month are tapping their way through their last entry in November. They will type their final periods, save their work, and...what?
It's a fascinating psychological moment, this. First of all, if you've made it through, congratulations! It's a terrific feat of persistence, stamina and resolve to write every day (or nearly every day, from what I understand) for a month. You can get an awful lot done; learn about yourself, understand a bit about what it takes to write a piece of long fiction, perhaps work through a story that's been burning or percolating its way through you for months or years.
Some people can finish a whole novel (or at least a draft) in the course of the month. Most don't, and are left with half or two-thirds of a story and a new calendar page with a puppy dressed in a Santa costume. What to do?
Well, the first thing NOT to do is send it out on submission, as almost assuredly it's not really done. But that's not even a particularly interesting statement. Really, what most people who haven't done this before need to do is take a deep breath and simply soldier on. The purpose of the November Exercise is to kickstart your writing. It's not really to actually go start-to-finish in a month. Now the goal should be to finish a draft and then set out to edit like crazy (and then have more objective people than your spouse or sister read it). Then, eventually, after even more sweat, you can think about whether your germ of an idea in October could turn out to be Water for Elephants, a famous NaNoWriMo success.
A great example of the benefits of NaNoWriMo is a young writer named Samantha Sweeney, who's studying at Simmons College in Mass while writing for Metro newspapers out of Boston. Sam decided to try her hand at NaNoWriMo, and her editor not only let her write about the process, but syndicated her columns around the country.
I read about Sam on the subway on the first Tuesday in November, got in touch with her, and we've been talking and emailing all month as she's been writing her novel. It's a family drama set in Queens (think Brothers McMullen) and explores many domestic themes (with a particular emphasis on abandonment). As November winds down, the story isn't complete, but Sam has made great headway in taking an idea, a character, a mood, a setting, and beginning to shape it into a novel.
It's been a fascinating process for me to follow (and, I suspect, for Sam to write), and I hope that there will be a lot of emails, drafts, edits to come as November transitions to December, and the weather gets chillier and then turns again. Because as anyone who's sat down and sweated out a book (whether in stores or in storage) knows, this is a long and difficult road, where the first month is barely a prologue to the months (and at time years) that make up the entire creative arc of a successful novel. So if you've made it this far, congrats and good luck on the rest of your journey, and when it's ready--really ready!--then I hope to read it, love it, take it on, and see it through to great success.
