NaNoHellNo
Nov. 6th, 2007 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spookyeviloneI keep getting asked if I'm doing NaNo.
Hell no.
It may be a great tool and a pat on the back for people who have trouble writing. I don't have that problem. I'm a pathological writer. It's a sickness with no cure. I have difficulty when I'm in an environment when I can't write. I jones. I shake. I sweat. I bite things. I have to verbally tell people the ideas chasing around in circles in my head and then try not to kill the person when they say, "Hey, that'd make a good story. You should totally write that out."
50k words? Yeah, no problem, I write more than that a month anyway - on about 15 different stories at any given time, sometimes more, sometimes less, and not including all the blurbs that aren't stories but story ideas that haven't finished forming in the murky confines of my limited human brainpan.
Putting up with the squawking morons who think anything that comes across as remotely literate should be the next Great American Novel? No, thanks. I can see the flaws in my own writing, and appreciate genuine and constructive crit. Yes, I'm aware that there are some good writers and even better readers who do NaNo, but for the most part, I can quite literally crap a better and more cohesive story than most of the garbage on there, and the idea that people would read and cheer something I crapped out makes me taste vomit. I have no pretensions of being a good writer, or a novelist - good writers and novelists? They actually finish stories in a timely manner. I? Don't. Can't. Not possible. I don't think linearly. I get snapshots in my head of the various scenes, and I may know the timeline to my story back to front and sideways as well - but stringing them together takes time and effort and the transitions just aren't things I want to write, and anything I have to force myself to write tends to wind up a lifeless husk that I hate and have to go back and pick the corpse of until it turns into something I can live with. The very idea of banging out 50k words in a row without editing them makes me cringe.
I tell a good story, in a way that's engaging to my audience of choice. That's why people read my journal. The difference between the journal and my writing is that the journals are pretty much written as if they're verbal. First person present or past, usually. Writing a story that way is easy, but doing it in a way that keeps the audience in tune with the original vision isn't something I can do all in one chunk. Doing it that way and keeping it well written is a lot harder than banging out 50k words in a month, and not something I'd be happy producing the NaNo way.
So, there you have it. Why I'm not doing NaNo. I have nothing against people who do, and I applaud any effort that gets people away from TV and video games long enough to create something on their own, so more power to you if you're game-on for the next three weeks.
Hell no.
It may be a great tool and a pat on the back for people who have trouble writing. I don't have that problem. I'm a pathological writer. It's a sickness with no cure. I have difficulty when I'm in an environment when I can't write. I jones. I shake. I sweat. I bite things. I have to verbally tell people the ideas chasing around in circles in my head and then try not to kill the person when they say, "Hey, that'd make a good story. You should totally write that out."
50k words? Yeah, no problem, I write more than that a month anyway - on about 15 different stories at any given time, sometimes more, sometimes less, and not including all the blurbs that aren't stories but story ideas that haven't finished forming in the murky confines of my limited human brainpan.
Putting up with the squawking morons who think anything that comes across as remotely literate should be the next Great American Novel? No, thanks. I can see the flaws in my own writing, and appreciate genuine and constructive crit. Yes, I'm aware that there are some good writers and even better readers who do NaNo, but for the most part, I can quite literally crap a better and more cohesive story than most of the garbage on there, and the idea that people would read and cheer something I crapped out makes me taste vomit. I have no pretensions of being a good writer, or a novelist - good writers and novelists? They actually finish stories in a timely manner. I? Don't. Can't. Not possible. I don't think linearly. I get snapshots in my head of the various scenes, and I may know the timeline to my story back to front and sideways as well - but stringing them together takes time and effort and the transitions just aren't things I want to write, and anything I have to force myself to write tends to wind up a lifeless husk that I hate and have to go back and pick the corpse of until it turns into something I can live with. The very idea of banging out 50k words in a row without editing them makes me cringe.
I tell a good story, in a way that's engaging to my audience of choice. That's why people read my journal. The difference between the journal and my writing is that the journals are pretty much written as if they're verbal. First person present or past, usually. Writing a story that way is easy, but doing it in a way that keeps the audience in tune with the original vision isn't something I can do all in one chunk. Doing it that way and keeping it well written is a lot harder than banging out 50k words in a month, and not something I'd be happy producing the NaNo way.
So, there you have it. Why I'm not doing NaNo. I have nothing against people who do, and I applaud any effort that gets people away from TV and video games long enough to create something on their own, so more power to you if you're game-on for the next three weeks.