NaNoWriMo Reality Check

I follow a lot of agents on twitter, and apparently many of them look forward to December with trepidation. That’s when “novels” that are 50K or so, rough, unedited, and sloppy, hit their desks.

I find this unbelievable. Not that the agents dread it, and not that it happens, but that so little common sense takes hold in our frantic writing minds. So I want to go over some basic rules of publishing that may clash with the awesome positive-feeling-fest that is NaNoWriMo. Not trying to rain on parades, but consider this your umbrella for the deluge to follow.

1. 50K words is not a novel. OK, it may be a middle grade novel, or YA, and it technically is a novel by definition, but in most cases a publisher won’t look at your work if it’s not at least 80K words. So if you write 50K, you may not be done with it.
2. Write. Let it sit a week or two. Read. Rewrite. Send to First Readers. Rewrite again. Then-and only then-submit. This process will take you past December and into January or February, depending mostly on your readers. If you’re proud of this book, your baby, then make sure to wash its face and brush its hair and make sure breakfast isn’t smeared all over its shirt before you send it to school for picture day.
3. Learn how to write a good cover letter. This bit of advice was going to be, “don’t say you did NaNoWriMo in your cover letter” but I decided just to remind you about good cover letters overall. Remember- take out all pointless details regarding you, your writing process, and your book. This includes how much your mom liked it, how you are a school teacher/librarian/doctor/real estate agent, the number of children you have, how long you’ve wanted to be a writer, and any details about the actual writing of the book. It’s not necessary information, and there still is a decidedly amateur stigma around NaNoWriMo. It’s a program designed to get people writing, not to get people published. If you get published, great, but think about trying out for the Yankees because you signed up for a community baseball team last summer. Telling an agent/editor that you wrote the book really fast implies that you didn’t research, edit, or even care. And it’s true, to win at NaNoWriMo, you shouldn’t be researching, editing, or caring about the polished product — in November. That’s what editing is for. See #2.
4. Don’t let their grumbling stop you. Lastly, no one can stop you from submitting. They may grumble, but its their job to find the diamond in the rough. So you write that book, then flesh it out, then edit it, then next spring you submit it with a pro cover letter, and they may never know it was a NaNoWriMo novel unless you tell them — AFTER you’ve signed.

Keep writing. That is your focus, nothing more.

Oh, and: