![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
Author Simon Haynes, who still believes in NaNoWriMo for some reason, tipped me to the user forum at the NaNo website, where the contents of next year’s slushpiles and bottom drawers are slowly taking shape.
Dear God, the horror. They actually do discuss tips on shameless padding.
My favourites:
“Restaurant scenes with a large group of people are wonderful. You can detail what every person is eating.”
“Have characters introduce themselves, with family history, to everyone they meet. Including grocery store clerks.”
“Oh, and you could always have one character be hard of hearing … so he has to constantly ask people to repeat themselves.”
(I have a hearing problem. Asking people to repeat themselves is one of the most boring parts of life, let alone fiction.)
One NaNo veteran has taken it further and has a webpage devoted to padding techniques, including longwinded descriptions of each. His final point:
“XI. Don’t actually set out to write something good.”
Then what the hell is the point?
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Sounds like every phat phantsy novel I’ve ever endured…
I once received a piece of advice from Kevin J. Anderson about writing the first draft of novels, to whit: Dare to be bad.
He undoubtedly meant that you shouldn’t worry about quality when it comes to getting the story out: just get out what needs to be told, then go back and polish it into the finished product.
I’m guessing these guys found a different interpretation
Good advice. It’s OK to be bad by accident, esp. in a first draft, as long as you edit out the bad later.
To be bad on purpose, though, reduces the overall potential of the human race. Think of the ditches that are not being dug.
You want a truly staggering figure? Go to my Nano profile page and click ‘Turn’ (bottom right corner.) On the top left of page 2 you’ll find an up-to-date total of ALL words by ALL Nano writers to date. (1st Nov 2006 to now.) And that’s just those who have bothered to update their wordcount.
For the complete experience, picture that lot printed out in double spaced manuscript format, then imagine the ditch you’d need to bury it all.
Of note is that the region ‘England: Elsewhere’ is second in the rankings, and about to take first. I’m genuinely surprised at that.
That’s the spirit, Simon! A mass grave for Nano manuscripts. Now that’s entertainment.
372,000,000 words written by Nano-ers in the past 11 days.
If you printed that out it’d take 3000 reams (1.5m pages) of A4 paper.
And we’re only just at the 1/3 mark
Then what the hell is the point?
I think the primary point of NaNoWriMo is just to write 50,000 more or less related words in something masquerading as a novel in a single month. If you really want to write something good, IMHO, you’re better off working without set word limits and time constraints. Let the story tell itself instead of worrying about how long it has to be and how soon it has to be completed!
“Don’t actually set out to write something good” sounds very much like the advice in Ian McFadyen’s “How To Write A Best Selling Fantasy Novel”… except that McFadyen was kidding, and those padding-happy clowns are not.
Read it here:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~imcfadyen/notthenet/fantasy.htm
The point is probably similar to the old trope of 1 million monkeys typing for a million years, hoping for Shakespeare.
25,000 humans and a month? Ya never know.