The Joy of SoCNoC

The joy of SoCNoC

I’ve enjoyed reading the daily blog posts by different authors during SoCNoC – the advice is great and it’s interesting to hear how other writers are getting on.  Blacksheep and Jayztar this week talked about their novels running away with them. I really love that part of SoCNoC - when your characters take on a life of their own and start doing unexpected things, even though it can create the need for hasty plot rethinks.

Having said that, this hasn’t happened to me so far this SoCNoC.  Maybe because I’ve given my characters a fairly rigid plot structure, but most likely because this week, life got in the way of writing and I left them languishing and lost in the Chilean desert (sorry guys).  

It’s good, if the wheels of your creative jeep have run into the soft desert sand of week 3, to reflect on the value of writing 50,000 words in one month and remind yourself why you got involved in this crazy exercise.  When I first heard of SoCNoC (which was only last year), it didn’t immediately grab me.  Firstly I thought it was impossible, unless you could do nothing but write for a whole month.  And then I thought, what is the point of writing 50,000 words of dribble, just so you can say you’ve done it?  (I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that anything I wrote that quickly would be dribble.)  But I can’t ignore a challenge.  Once I’d worked out that SoCNoC involved writing a mere 1,667 words per day, my interest was piqued and before I knew it, I’d signed up for it.

I’m interested in what writers get out of SoCNoC and other NaNo challenges and why they do them.  It seems that some people use it to kick-start ideas that they’ve been working on for a while and intend to develop further once SoCNoC has finished, while for others, it seems to be a creative leap into the dark.  For me, it has two big benefits.  One is the intensity of writing quickly and planning on the hoof for a whole month - it’s a creative change of pace from my normal painstaking approach to writing that forces me to silence my inner critic.  If I didn’t, there’s no way that I would get to 50,000 words.  And when I read through stuff that I’ve typed out at the speed of my thoughts more or less (I’m either a fast typist or a slow thinker – you decide), it’s not nearly as bad as my inner critic told me it was while I was writing it.  And the other big benefit is that it enables me to test out ideas for novels quickly.  Writing that amount of a novel in a month is a very quick way of finding out if the plot stands up, if the characters work and whether it’s interesting enough to carry on with.  I could spend years finding that out (and indeed I have, in the past).

I always think that the act of writing is valuable even if nothing comes of what I’m working on.  My non-writing friends are horrified when I tell them I’ve abandoned things I’ve been working on for months or even years.  But my view is that when I’m writing, I’m learning about writing.  Everything I work on is part of my development as a writer and I think SoCNoC contributes hugely to that.

So my advice for today: no matter how SoCNoC is panning out for you, remember why you’re doing it, go where your writing takes you and enjoy the ride!