Do you do NaNoWriMo? Why or why not?
Lydia's answer is here, and Laura's is here. Next week, Deb is up.
As for me:
Um, no. Not really. I think NaNo is awesome ... if you need it to get you going. And if the timing is perfect.
Don't get me wrong. I'm incredibly deadline driven. I think artificial set-ups like NaNo provide external scaffolding when internal motivation is not enough. But for me, and the way I write, it hasn't really worked out. See, if I'm not in the mood to write, I don't. And if I am ...
During August and September, I was working on a project, which I will call SGS. It got interrupted very briefly for me to write a time-sensitive proposal, but then I went back to SGS and planned to have it finished by the end of October.
Except ... I had an idea. It kept scraping and tapping on the inside of my skull whenever I sat down to work on SGS, which was coming to me slower, and slower, and then--I just decided I had to write this new thing and get it out of my head. So, on 10/16, I wrote a synopsis for the shiny new idea, a strange YA steampunk-gothic-retelling-thingy. And on 10/17, I started it, and promised myself (and my agent), that I'd only spend a month on it.
On Saturday, 11/12, the first draft was complete at 76,000 words. It's with beta readers now.
So, this is why I don't NaNo. My ideas come when they come, and I write them with their own timing, and that's how it's worked so far. However, I can honestly say that if the timing is ever right, and if I ever did need that external structure to get a project hammered out in a set amount of time, I would totally do it, because the support and enthusiasm of the NaNo participants is really fun to watch.
How about you--are you in the midst of a NaNo sprint? How's it going? If you're sitting out this year, have you done NaNo in past years? Why not this year?
