Right, so, here's what I think the secret to winning NaNo is.



No, seriously.

Two years ago was my first NaNo. I did it on a whim, signing up on Oct 31st. I'd never written a word of fiction before. And I made it to 52k - though, by then, I'd gotten bogged down by the fact I had no idea how to construct a novel. Still, I got the words out.

Last year I couldn't get off the ground. There were a bunch of non-writing factors, but the writing factor was that I kept trying to clean up everything I wrote. All the things I'd learned/read in the intervening year about good prose kept getting in the way. Result - no win.

Now, when I look back at my 52k of crap from 2009, I realize that, even if it had been *good* writing, I wouldn't have kept much of it. After all, even with an outline (which I stopped 1 week in to produce, when I realized I had no idea what the middle of my story was), there was still too much unknown. The characters were still fleshing themselves out, various scenes turned out to be too slow, or best combined with another scene, minor characters started taking up too much time doing stuff better left offstage, etc.

In other words, even if it had been lovely, polished prose, I wouldn't have saved most of it. Its value was in finding out more about my world and in test-driving a necessarily flawed plot.

Sure, there are professional authors who have enough experience to get the plot and characters right the first time. Who can draw up an outline and, reliably, have it work. I don't know about you, but I'm not one of them.


The point is, seems to me that trying to come up with decent prose in Nano is a waste of time. Writing anything but crap is a waste of time - because, odds are, what you're going to "save" out of the Nano process isn't the words and sentences themselves, but the information and insight into your world/characters it produces, or the discovery of what scenes don't work or need compressing or should simply, after all, be left out.

And that you can do without good prose. Without even slightly polished prose.

That you can do with prose that looks like something the cat dragged in, ate, spat up, and then rolled in.


So, here's my NaNo advice - write crap.

Not just rough prose, not just "okay, maybe it'll be shabby" prose. CRAP.

If you aren't writing crap, write faster. Deactivate the backspace key. Shut your eyes. Whatever it takes to write crap.

And don't feel bad that it's crap. Rejoice that it's crap. Roll around in it like the metaphorical cat of a few lines above.


Crap is good. Crap is your friend. Crap is what wins NaNo.




Okay, there's my $0.02.

Good luck all!
-LP