No NaNoWriMo

Despite wanting to get back into writing, once again I won’t be taking part  in NaNoWriMo (Or National Novel Writing Month, to give it the full title)

Both Andy and Gordon have written their thoughts about it, which pretty much resonate with my own.  I think that while it can be good, I don’t actually want to write somerhing where, as the NaNoWriMo site puts it

The only thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

The idea is that you just write, you don’t (in theory at least) spend loads of time thinking about story arcs, characters, events and the like. It’s the equivalent of writing a brain-dump, a stream of consciousness.   And that, I think, is my problem with it. I don’t like reading that kind of book – why the blinking sun-stunned chuff would I want to write one?

As it is, with D4D™ I’ve written some 800,000+ words (which is pretty sodding gobsmacking in itself) which is the equivalent of roughly eight novels. Obviously I know it’s not eight novels, but it does work as a comparison figure.

I’d like to go back to writing something ‘proper’ – it’s been an aim for a while, and will continue to be so – whether it’s a screenplay or something more novel-like. But I want to do it properly, not just as a “Write 50,000 words in a month” project. I’ve got some ideas that need developing – and there’ll be more about that in a different post sometime soon – but I honestly don’t think NaNoWriMo is for me.

Of course, if we come back at the start of November 2010 and I still haven’t got any of those ideas out into ‘proper’ writing, I might have a bit of a rethink on that.