A few days ago I received an email from the NaNoWriMo Team kindly informing me that I, proud winner of the 50,000 word-race, am now in the NowWhat Months where, like some other (thousand? million?) people around the world, I am wondering what I could possibly do with that, now that hype’s gone and I’m back to real life.
Options are a few, some of them rather sensible:
– Getting a feedback, which seems a fine idea even if you’ve written the next Lord of the Rings. This however takes for granted that you already have your novel in a readable and decently edited form, which is not often the case (mine is not even close, just to be clear).
– Searching expert advice that can guide/help writers from first draft to publication. This seems a safe choice, especially for people that have never published a book, but also for all the ones that have decided to see their baby out on the market. If you’ve made up your mind, voila’ a good starting point. Also this NaNoWriMo Blog lists some useful resources.
Not exactly belonging to any of those cases, I made my own NaNoWriMo damage assessment and checked out which options do remains open to me:
– Print the manuscript out and then use it to light my fire (it’s not a metaphor: The UK is under snow right now, and I need stuff for my fireplace). Pros: considering the length, it will make a lot of sheets of paper, to last until the end of the British winter. Also, burning unpublished novels has a long and well-respected tradition. Virgil’s Aeneid was committed to fire by his author on his deathbed, and even Bulgakov destroyed in this way The Master and Margherita‘s first draft. (Both were luckily saved from the flames. Many other books should have instead ended up that way, but this is another story). Cons: Even considering its carbon footprint (less than you might expect), it’s inefficient energy-wise and environmentally criminal. Decision: discard.
(Vergilius Vaticanus)
– Give the novel a positive use as training material for my university classes of decision making and quantitative methods for social sciences. My Master students are on average of the same age of my hero (he’s a military academy fresh graduate), who makes astonishingly dumb decisions (also) for lack of the above-mentioned skills. Pros: case-studies are the best way to teach this kind of topics. I literally spend hours writing new ones every year. This option allows for net savings of night time that could be given a better use (sleeping is one). Cons: 85-90% of the manuscript would be unused anyway. Also, it could give my students dangerous ideas (e.g. making experiments with some psychedelic drugs of the future with an unpronounceable name or dissecting an alien in the case they meet one. My hero doesn’t do these things, sure, but SF works in mysterious ways especially on young minds. You never know). Decision: discard.
– Store it away and have a go at it when I retire. Pros: I will have time enough to extract *perhaps* something good (fiction-wise) out of it. Cons: I’m decades away from that moment. Cosmology theories might change in the meantime, and make the premise invalid. I would find it even crappier than it looks to me now, and I will destroy it in a tantrum. Decision: discard.
(2014 NaNoWriMo Statistics)
– Have a go at it now, finish it (nowadays SF novels are all around 80-100K, and for a reason) and get it edited. I can’t find any pros, only thousand of cons – no time, lack of sleep, schedule conflicts and so on. But, and this is the startling and disquieting discovery I have made, writing fiction is addictive, and once you have started it is difficult/impossible to opt out. (I stress fiction here. I write non-fiction for a living since at least a decade, and it has never given me any withdrawal syndrome. Just the opposite.) You irremediably drawn to it, like compulsion – I could equate this to my fatal (i.e. questionable) attraction to dark chocolate or manga.
And this, nobody tells you before. So people, be very careful the moment you decide to go for this type of challenges and write the stories that populate your mind and haunt your dreams (we all have them. Some of us write about them, and some others read books that make them alive. That’s the only difference). You might never stop.