KimElliott.net

There aren’t many things in this life that I hate. Fried eggs. The Office. Apartheid. For the next thirty days, I’ve got something else to add to that list; NaNoWriMo.

If you’re not a writer, you probably won’t have heard of NaNoWriMo. It’s a motivational website with the aim of getting authors to write 50,000 words in a month. For some reason, that month is November. I guess people don’t have much to do before advent.

If you’ve ever written a dissertation for a degree or similar, you’ll know fifty thousand words is a lot. It’s half a book. National Novel Writing Month doesn’t help writers with the discipline of getting a novel down on paper, it helps them turn into pulp writers.

Unlike the penny per word authors Raymond Chandler and Anais Nin, most of these people don’t already have the skills needed to be a good writer so they try to reach their goal by spilling out overwritten disconnected clichés.

I saw a book written by a NaNoWriMo author once, at the time I didn’t have the courage to tell them the book wasn’t so great. Luckily for me someone else did and I didn’t have to spend week after week talking about vivid descriptions. It was a bit like this:

Blonde haired, blue eyed, brown dressed, Anglo-French dentist, Doris Audrey Largerman walked slowly but surely down the long and winding asphalt road. Her thick, heavy, laced boots clunked mightily with each single step. First her left foot, clunk. Then her right foot, clunk. Then her left foot again. Clunk. As she walked down the long and winding asphalt road, Doris Audrey Largerman breathed in, the air circulating her lungs and then her heart, which is a muscle, made a wheezing whooshing sound. In, out, whoosh went the air…

If you don’t want to hang yourself now, please come round and teach me to be a better writing critic. Or enter NaNoWriMo, write something amazing and prove it can be done. I give honest feedback these days.

When other writers find out you’ve even had a snifter of success, they always ask for your secret. Even though I still don’t know if I’ve worked out how to make gold or purest green, my advice is this: Take the time working out where your story is going and then you can enjoy telling that story to your audience. Or, to put it another way, don’t just shit it out.