NaNoWriMo or not? And was Jack Kerouac doing a similar thing…

Jack Kerouac became famous for writing his iconic novel, On the Road, while living on Benzedrine, coffee and pea soup (made by his wife Joan) on a road trip over thirty days. He wrote on one long sheet of paper, using tracing paper he’d cut to size for his typewriter and then taped together so he wouldn’t have to slow down for more paper. Although it was ‘“spontaneous writing”, he had planned some of it in advance, something people trying to copy him might not have realised. After editing it, and I can only imagine how difficult that was, it was published in 1957 and became a cult, “Beat Generation” hit.

Being able to write in the same circumstances in such a short space of time as Kerouac did appears exciting, radical and dangerous. However, writing a book in a limited amount of time is not as unusual as you might think. Many successful novelists have systems that help them plan and finish books in a similar amount of time. Authors like Arthur Conan Doyle with A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes mystery, was written in three weeks and weighs in at 43,625 words!

But for the less practised or less successful writer, the possibility of managing that can feel impossible. With this in mind, and for reasons still not entirely clear to me, this year, (blame the pandemic) I decided to do NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know what that is, check out the website Nanowrimo.org for a full explanation. Basically, you write every day for the month of November to create a novel of 50,000 words.

Does it have to be 50K words? Well, that’s the idea, though others say it’s as long as you want. Others say it’s an excellent method to ensure you write every day. Getting into the habit of putting words on the page is always good if you profess to be a writer.

Before I started, I followed the ‘preptober’ guidelines (i.e. planning your novel in October)- all available on various websites online. My favourite was an American one on the Heartbreathings.com blog, which had fun downloads and lots of encouragement. I really enjoyed this method as I did the same planning with the novel I wrote, SuperRecogniser (now in the editing phase). I like to know where I’m potentially going with a story and be able to change what I’d thought I’d write and then go off in a different direction. I did a bit of that in Super Recogniser and see that I’ve been doing it in my NaNoWriMo work. Which makes it fun!

The most interesting thing I’ve found about having a deadline every day for your personal writing is that you are more pushy about getting uninterrupted writing time. Which is a good thing. Other people take your writing time more seriously and because of this, so do you.

If you’re interested in doing NaNoWriMo, you still can! Fewer days, fewer words, but still a useful exercise for writers. Or, of course, you can do it on a different month…