Image by owlbookdreams via FlickrThe idea is that you write every day during November, working towards a target word count of 50,000 words. If you manage that then by the end you have a completed first draft of a novel. A short novel, admittedly - they're usually more in the 90,000+ range - but a novel nonetheless, which you can then either continue to work on and make longer, or edit into something worthy of submission. Given my problem with obsessively self-editing myself after every sentence, I figured this could be just the kick in the butt that I need to make me Just Sit And Write!
So the proper start was on November 1st, but as I only heard about it for the first time yesterday I'm two days behind. You update your profile with your current word count as often as you like and it gives you stats about your average words per day, words left till you hit the overall target, words till you hit today's goal and that sort of thing. And there's a graph! I do love a nice graph, they're so motivating! If I'd started on time I 'should' (though there are no hard and fast rules, just suggested guidelines) be up to 5000 words by the end of today. Of course I'm not, but I am up to 2002 (the 2 are important!) which I feel is pretty darned good - the most I've ever written in one day in fact. And the best thing is that I'm not too displeased with what I've written - just letting it come out of my head onto the screen has not resulted in the terrible dross that I feared it would. You can see my latest word count on the little blue gizmo thingy on the left of the screen.
From what I can gather there is a lot of criticism of this whole idea, not least because it advertises itself as a contest and explicitly states that it's all about quantity not quality. If you make it to 50,000 words (and you have to upload them so their gadget thingy can verify that you haven't just copy-pasted the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog 5500 times) then you are classed as a Winner and you get some goodies (I'm not sure what). Many professional writers/people in the publishing world think this is bad - writing's not a competition (in that sense at least) or a race, and I would agree with that. If people go through this process and then send the end product straight off to a publisher or agent, I can imagine that person would probably be pretty peeved at having to read through them all because 99% of them must be awful! The first draft is just the foundations, not the finished house! The site does say that the work done in November is just the first part of the overall process - once you've written it you do have to edit it - but I guess a lot of people must choose to ignore that, thinking that they've got all these words down, so that should be fine.
Anyway, I'm being honest with myself and acknowledging that it's unlikely I'll get to 50,000 words by the end of November (unless I take the entire month off work). For me it's going to be more of a way to train myself to just let the words flow, with the added bonus that by the end of it I will at least have a substantial chunk of story to do with what I like. Next year will be different though...next year I will be a WINNER! ;oD
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