That’s right. A million of ‘em. Only after you write a whole bargeload of BS will you a) start to recognize what’s good and b) start getting a handle on the craft. Yes. Start. Don’t open a Word doc, type until the word count reaches 1,000,000 and expect words 1,000,001+ to magically be Nobel Prize-worthy prose. After a million bad words, Young Grasshopper, you will truly be ready to begin.

Hey, no grumbling! No “but I’m special and the exception to the rule” allowed! If you’re not published yet, you’ve still got work to do, my friend. If getting a novel published by a major house was an easy task, nobody would be pining away in offices or waiting tables. They’d all be sitting around in coffee shops, bent over their laptops. Getting published is not for everyone, not everyone will attain that goal, and it really has to be earned.

Ally Carter has a great analogy: a garden hose that hasn’t been used in a while. Think about your own backyard. If you’ve got a pretty old hose there that’s been sitting through the fall and the winter, you’ve got to flush out all the leaves and gunk and spider webs first. When you turn on the water, it’ll be full of dirt. You have to get all of that out before the water can run clear.

That’s just what you’re doing when you begin your writing practice. By writing a million bad words, by turning on that garden hose and waiting for the pristine water, you’re getting all the bad story ideas, the flat characters, the predictable plot arcs, the cliches, the boring descriptions, the bad jokes, the overblown hyperbole, the bombastic scenery, basically, the crap, out of your writing system.

Once you’ve drained it all away, you’re left with a more agile and intelligent writing brain that can get cracking on the good stuff. Writing is a thing to be practiced, just like everything else. Write every day. Do it diligently and without ego until those million bad words are behind you. Then write every day, diligently and without ego some more. And, you know, if you’re feeling sympathetic to the Plight of the Slush, please don’t send me a sampling from that first million. I’m much more interested in words 1,000,001+.

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. I’ll do some posts on critique groups later.)

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.