Wednesday 6 November 2013

Because a thesis just wasn't enough...

This year, for the first time, I am taking part in something that I have long been tempted by: I am 'doing' NaNoWriMo 2013. NaNoWriMo, if you haven't heard of it, stands for 'National Novel Writing Month', i.e. November, during which participants are encouraged to write a novel of 50,000 words or more. 

As this blog might imply, I truly enjoy writing, and I've felt a little sad over the last few years that I haven't invested much time in writing fiction, which is really where a love of writing all started for me. When I was sixteen I wrote and quite literally 'self-published' - i.e. printed out and bound up using an industrial stapler - a novel about the stone gargoyles and stained-glass angels of a village church coming to life on Midsummer's Eve, and sold it to friends, family, teachers, and anyone else who could be guilt-tripped into paying £3.50 for it in order to raise funds for a trip to China. I even sent it off, unsolicited, to a number of publishers, resulting in a cherished sheath of rejection letters.

So, this year I decided that this would be the year I finally did NaNoWriMo. To my pleasant surprise, when I mentioned this to Mr S he said that he had been thinking the exact same thing, so we're currently doing it together and cheer-leading / guilt-tripping one another on.

I am having a massive amount of fun. Perhaps out of an unconscious desire for an antithesis to the planning-heavy early days of the PhD, my brain produced an excellent premise for a novel on the night of October 31st, so rather than writing up any of my ready-plotted ideas I found myself leaping straight in on November 1st with absolutely no idea of where I was headed. I am now 12,839 words in and have only a hazy idea of what the next chapter will contain. Don't even ask me about an ending. But, instead of sleeping in for an extra half an hour in the morning, or falling asleep in front of yet another xojane article at the end of the day, I'm writing and disappearing into this whole fictional world.

It's also, ironically, making me both more productive in my academic work, and helping me to feel less stressed about the PhD. Mr S and I have got into the habit of trying to write half our daily 'quota' (you have to write at least 1666 words a day - plus an extra 20 at the end! - to get to 50,000) first thing in the morning, and it certainly wakes you up. The feeling of achievement of bashing out 1000 words before breakfast also certainly helps to keep up morale when turning to read Foucault (don't ask). And as for stress, well, let's just say that after writing 12,000 words in six days, writing 80,000 words over three years doesn't seem quite so bad. Obviously there's a lot more to a PhD than just writing by the skin of one's teeth, as I am with NaNoWriMo, but I also feel much happier about my initial plan of front-loading my research and having a real 'writing up' period in my last year (a tactic that is more unusual in the humanities than in the sciences, I think).

Is there anyone else out there doing NaNoWriMo? How are you finding it?

Next time... if I work up the courage, I might give you a synopsis of my novel, or at least the fifth of it that I've written so far!

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