Dear Authors and Readers: I Am A Total And Utter Spanner

Bet you didn’t expect this kind of honesty this late in the week, eh? I thought not. But I need to admit I’m a twit before I make any other wild pronouncements this month.

Define: Spanner

For those of you not familiar with different designations of Irish eejitry, a Tool is a person of significantly limited wisdom, and a Spanner is a particularly moronic type of tool, characterised by regular brainless activity, such as the spouting of irrelevant things, like the price of cabbage and whatnot.

So, It’s November the 1st, and…

My entitlement to the title of Spanner comes because I’ve signed up to do NaNoWriMo again, writing 50,000 words in November under the umbrella of the worldwide National Novel Writing Month club, in a month when I have fifty thousand things to do, let alone fifty thousand words on one of my novels which has been outlined and re-outlined about fifty thousand times at this stage.

However, I did it last year, at a time when I shouldn’t have had the spare capacity to scratch myself, thus proving that I live in a suspended state of unwarranted optimism and daft imaginings.

Which, I believe, are the only characteristics needed to qualify as a writer. N’est pas?

The Bestseller Link

Anyhoo, to keep it on topic, the most famous participant in NaNoWriMo I’m aware of, according to the success it brought them, is Erin Morgenstern, author of  the magical epic The Night Circus. Her screaming bestseller started off as a NaNoWriMo novel, and ended up in print, generating oodles of praise and discussion in turn. And it’s a major incentive.

There are definitely some participants who merely upload a previously-written 1,667 words a day (or 5 – 10,000, making it blatantly obvious), and call it writing. Perhaps they do it out of loneliness. There are, however, others, who use NaNoWriMo to force themselves to spew the words out which otherwise they would be tweaking, beating and rewriting until their novel simply dies of exhaustion, endless, resolutionless and begging for mercy.

The reason I’m doing NaNoWriMo is to force me to get it down finally in a first draft, whether the writing is awful or not, because I otherwise might not finish it. The only flipside is that the end result might look like the physical manifestation of Editor Abuse. (Which is my feeling about Morgenstern’s book, but hey, she sold loads of them, so who cares.)

Anyone else out there joining me in this utterly foolish crusade? Have you done it before? And if so, why did you do it?