Hello everyone.
So, I am not a NaNo-hater. I LOVE this event. I realized how much I loved it when I was looking more forward to it than to Halloween or even Thanksgiving. It's awesome and I'm grateful to the program for finally getting me to treat myself as an author, to finally finish a work. Since I did my first NaNo last year I've written another novel (outside NaNo), and that's where my concern is: I ended up finishing it around 50k words, which was shorter even than my first NaNo, which ended around 65k words. After editing it ended up being even shorter.
Which I guess leads to my biggest writerly worry right now: has NaNo trained my brain to write 50k word novels? I know the "standard" is 80-100k for mainstream/literary fiction, which is what I write. And I also realize that maybe my second novel was just a short one. Maybe really it was a novella. It feels finished. I didn't hit the wordcount and just abandon the story or anything. It ended where it needed to end and I don't want to pad it.
What I worry about is the mindset that "oh, I'm at 40k, better start wrapping things up," where I really should probably be only about at the middle of the book. Anybody else have this fear? That NaNo is conditioning them to write shorter novels? And that, moreover, NaNo is giving them an unhealthy and unproductive fascination with wordcount over story?
Don't mistake this as a complaint about NaNo. As I said, I love the program to death and am doing it currently, but I'm trying to take it slower story-wise, if not wordcount-wise.
So, I am not a NaNo-hater. I LOVE this event. I realized how much I loved it when I was looking more forward to it than to Halloween or even Thanksgiving. It's awesome and I'm grateful to the program for finally getting me to treat myself as an author, to finally finish a work. Since I did my first NaNo last year I've written another novel (outside NaNo), and that's where my concern is: I ended up finishing it around 50k words, which was shorter even than my first NaNo, which ended around 65k words. After editing it ended up being even shorter.
Which I guess leads to my biggest writerly worry right now: has NaNo trained my brain to write 50k word novels? I know the "standard" is 80-100k for mainstream/literary fiction, which is what I write. And I also realize that maybe my second novel was just a short one. Maybe really it was a novella. It feels finished. I didn't hit the wordcount and just abandon the story or anything. It ended where it needed to end and I don't want to pad it.
What I worry about is the mindset that "oh, I'm at 40k, better start wrapping things up," where I really should probably be only about at the middle of the book. Anybody else have this fear? That NaNo is conditioning them to write shorter novels? And that, moreover, NaNo is giving them an unhealthy and unproductive fascination with wordcount over story?
Don't mistake this as a complaint about NaNo. As I said, I love the program to death and am doing it currently, but I'm trying to take it slower story-wise, if not wordcount-wise.
