I haven’t been writing too much here, but I have an excuse: National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo.

In case you’ve never heard of it: it happens every November. You have 30 days to write 50,000 words. If you succeed, your prize is a lovely batch of bragging rights.

Sounds crazy, I know. But it can be done. 50,000 words over 30 days averages to 1667 words per day. That’s difficult, but not at all impossible. If you’re dedicated, you can do that much in two or three hours. I average around 700 words an hour, so I can write my quota in a little over two hours–if I’m on the ball.

The point is volume and nothing more. You don’t have to worry about plot, or characters, or logic. You can make all the spelling and grammar mistakes you want. It doesn’t even have to be remotely coherent. All that matters is the word count.

Or, at least, word count is the only goal that NaNoWriMo imposes on you. (Insofar as they impose anything. It all runs entirely on the honor system. They have no way of knowing if you’re cheating.) There are lots of ways that people use it to help their writing discipline; I’m using it to try to get into the habit of writing every day.

The interesting thing is what happens when you give up on every goal other than headlong flight toward your 50K. Desperate for ideas, you start grabbing at anything that bubbles up out of your subconscious. People use all kinds of crazy strategies to extend the book–including killing major characters, abruptly shifting genres, inserting long dialogues about random topics. Whatever works to hold the writer’s interest.

My first NaNo novel was called Best Intentions. When I sat down to write it, at 12:01 am on November 1, 2005, I had nothing but an opening sentence:

If you ask me, it all started with that damn fire truck.

And from that, I spun a strange little yarn about two brothers. One of them, mentally retarded, underwent an experimental intelligence-enhancement procedure. (Yes, I ripped it off from Flowers for Algernon.) The other brother, the protagonist of the story, watched as his brother suddenly surpassed his family–and then, as a side effect, began committing inexplicable acts of violence.

Honestly, the book was dreadful. My spouse read it and said there might be a decent short story screaming to get out from inside it. But quality wasn’t the point: the point was the creative act, the complete indulgence and surrender to the creative impulse. I had a great deal of fun writing it, as horrible as it turned out to be.

And now I’m doing it again. This time, though, the work is quite a bit better. It’s called Labyrinths. I went in knowing only that I wanted to write a cheesy space opera. What I’m getting is definitely a space opera, but it’s not particularly cheesy; the writing is below par, once again, but the science is actually pretty strong. (Although I’m sure any physicists reading it would laugh hysterically at my clumsy reinterpretation of quantum mechanics.)

So, I’m currently at 15,079 words. My quota for today, the 14th, is 23,333. So I’m well behind (I started very slow). But today was my best day yet–2826 words–and I’ve just put in a major plot twist that will keep it interesting. I don’t expect I’ll have any trouble keeping up from here on; in fact I expect to catch up with quota over the next 10 days.

We will see. Hopefully, by the time I’m done, I’ll have freed my writing impulse to where I’ll be able to routinely turn out a thousand or two words per day. Onward.