Happy NaNoWriMo!

It’s that time of year again. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). As of midnight, people have descended upon typewriter, AlphaSmart, keyboard and ledger pad with ideas brimming in their heads and the zest of one important goal: to finish a 50,000-word manuscript in 30 days.

Good luck to one and all! NaNoWriMo sets writers up for writing an average of 1,667 words a day. This is great practice as, for most professional writers, NaNoWriMo is every month. The key to developing a writing career and getting serious isn’t a really active muse, it’s sitting down every day, at every opportunity, and, you know, writing. Only through that kind of practice will you be able to develop habits that will serve you for the rest of your (hopefully long) career.

So NaNoWriMo is good in that respect. It’s also good because it encourages writers to reach out to each other and start forming community. This is important, also, for developing good writing habits. A critique group and a base of trusted and “tough love” readers is key to every writer’s success. (Just make sure you choose writing partners who are slightly above your level, so that you get a lot out of the experience.)

There are, however, a few pitfalls to NaNoWriMo. I have no problem being the unpopular girl at the party and deflating every one’s balloons for a second. As an agent, my work is heavily impacted by NaNoWriMo, so I’ll give you another perspective on it. I apologize in advance.

Just because you’ve “won” NaNoWriMo and have 50,000+ words in your possession, doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily written a publishable book. You’ve taken the first step, and it’s an important one, but the road you’re venturing down is loooong.

I’d say that less than half of writing is the actual writing (the stuff NaNoWriMo helps you accomplish). The other, more crucial part, is revision. Many people can type 50,000 words into a document — and many do each November! — but those words will need to make sense, to have tension, pacing, to flow, to have images and themes teased out, to have characters solidified, subplots added, etc. etc. etc.

Most of the work of writing a novel is subconscious. Ideas strike. Plots marinate on the back burner. Characters evolve and change while you sleep. And all of that secondary work takes time. Like a fine wine, every novel that gets the benefit of time (and revision) only gets that much more complex. And editors are looking for complex stories with lots of layers and depth.

Every agent in the world sees a marked increase in queries starting December 1st. Why? Because many people have done NaNoWriMo and think that they now have “written a novel” just because they’ve reached an arbitrary wordcount. That’s true, technically. You have written a novel-length manuscript. I know it is an amazing feeling to do this for the first time, to achieve something you never thought you could, to do it in a month. It’s a great milestone. But it’s the beginning of a ton of work. Just as long as you don’t forget that.

So don’t let NaNo fool you. It could be the necessary means to advancing your writing career and establishing some great habits, but it is not the end of your work on whatever manuscript you’re NaNo-ing, not by a long shot. All the same rules — you know, the nasty, time-consuming, patience and revision parts — apply to NaNoWriMo books, too.

I say this to set your expectations. NaNoWriMo is beyond valuable, but it’s no magic bullet. I think in December, I’ll do a series of posts on revision so that we can all dig into our NaNo manuscripts and start getting them into shape. The writing is fun, it’s a whirlwind, it’s undiluted creation at its best. But as a lot of writers (and agents!) will tell you, revision is much more interesting and rewarding when you get right down to it.

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