hey guys welcome back to my channel and welcome back to another video. I'm sure
you guys have been seeing these NaNoWriMo videos all over the place
I'm hoping this one's a little different I'm hoping I don't get too much hate for
it but just know, I am going to be posting the twin to this video next week
which is nine reasons why you should NaNoWriMo. So I'm gonna be covering both
sides of things. First of all for those of you somehow don't know, NaNoWriMo is
National Novel Writing Month and basically it's a month where you
challenge yourself to write a novel. Not technically a novel in terms of how long
my novels are but 50,000 words in a month which comes out to roughly like a
thousand 667 words a day but basically the goal is to get out 50,000 words in
the month of November and if you do you win NaNoWriMo. So I've never participated
in this so far. I've had many reasons for not participating some of which I'm
going to be covering today. But this year I am going to be participating. I'm not
going to be starting a new project I'm going to be kind of cheating (not
actually cheating) and I'm going to be writing 50,000 words of Red River. So that's
50,000 only counting the words I write within the month of November, not
counting what I have so far. I recently had to re-do my outline to fix a
big plot hole so I had to scratch a lot of stuff and that put me back quite a
bit, so I'm sitting at about 20,000 words
right now after cutting all that stuff. oh it hurts. So I have a lot of time to
make up for now. So I'm going to make use of NaNoWriMo to do that and about
50,000 words during that month. Fun times. But I don't think NaNoWriMo is for
everyone so hopefully this will save some of you from participating if it's
not something that's gonna be healthy for you and your situation.
Quick disclaimer as with pretty much all of these videos this is based
on my opinions and you can take them with a grain of salt so that being said
let's get to the reasons. Reason number one you maybe shouldn't NaNoWriMo is if
you skipped preptober and/or plan to pants everything. I mean I'm an advocate
for outlines in all situations but especially if you're trying to pump out
50,000 words in a month and you want that to be coherent. I think you really
need an outline and other aspects of preptober as well. So like character
development. Starting from scratch, blank page, no characters, nothing, you're gonna
have a bad time. Reason number two you shouldn't NaNoWriMo, if you're just doing it
because you feel like you're not a real writer you don't. If you just feel
pressured by writer community and writer culture to do it because you-- It's just
part of writer life. That is not true you don't have to participate in NaNoWriMo. I
know tons and tons those big authors and big authortubers who do not participate
in NaNoWriMo and never have. And there's no shame in skipping it. You're still a
writer, obviously, and no one is going to judge you. And if they do then tell them
to stop because you can do whatever you want and it's not their place to judge
you. Three if you're doing it just for the reward.
I'm gonna come out and say it, the NaNoWriMo rewards for winning are just
company coupons. Honestly they probably benefit the company more than they do
the winners. It's just like 50% off Scrivener or 20% off whatever other
writing online random websites. They're discounts that you can generally find
any time throughout the year and ultimately they exist to get you to use
these companies permanently. So correct me if I'm wrong but all of the rewards to
me just seem like coupons and if that's the only reason you're doing it,
get out now save yourself. It's not worth it for those rewards. Four, if you're the
type of writer that edits as you go or you're just naturally a turtle writer. If
you edit as you go, generally you're gonna be outputting less words than a
standard writer who does a really rough first draft and then comes back to edit,
because obviously you're taking the time to stop and edit and that's gonna slow
you down. So NaNoWriMo being based on hitting word count goals is gonna make
you feel discouraged even though you're putting in other hours of work into it
that maybe those other writers aren't. But you're gonna see them hitting higher
numbers than you and you're gonna feel the pressure of that and unless you can
overcome that pressure then maybe your style writing just doesn't pair very
well with NaNoWriMo. Same for turtle writers. Some people just naturally write
slower, and believe me, I feel like I need to say this more than I
should, quality matters more than quantity when
it comes to books. So if you're a turtle writer and you write really slowly, as
long as you come up with good quality it doesn't matter. Of course if you're
making this a career you do have to output enough books maintain it as a
career but that doesn't mean writing a book a month, that doesn't mean you have
to win NaNoWriMo to be successful as an author for a career. So if you're a
turtle writer and you just can't write 50,000 words in a month that's okay and
quality matters more than getting out 50,000 words in a month, believe me.
Number five: if you don't perform well under deadlines or pressure. This is
essentially just a huge deadline with day-to-day pressure and word count goals.
And if you're one of those people who knowing that that deadline is coming up
gives you anxiety attacks that are gonna prevent you from writing, just skip
NaNoWriMo. Number six: this one is really important because I do see a lot of this
in general and in the writing community on Twitter
and NaNoWriMo just takes this and rattles it up even more.
You shouldn't participate in NaNoWriMo if seeing other people outperform you
makes you bitter and resentful. The nature of NaNoWriMo means people are
gonna be, in general, posting their daily word counts on Twitter and other social
media platforms and you're going to inevitably be comparing your numbers to
theirs and for the most part there are going to be a lot of days when your
numbers don't match up with other people's. And if you're one of those people
who sees that and gets bitter either against yourself or against them
NaNoWriMo is not the place for you. Not a good idea.
Number seven: you shouldn't
NaNoWriMo if you're interrupting another project. NaNoWriMo (unless you happen to
be at the stage in your other project where you need to take a month off and
come back to it which is the case after your first draft generally you want to
come back with it with fresh eyes after a month so in that case it's okay) but if
you're stopping another project in the middle to start a fresh new NaNoWriMo
project you're gonna have a bad time going back to that original project.
You're gonna lose the flow of things, you're gonna lose track of characters
and their attributes and story and passion. Don't do that to yourself.
Number eight: this one... okay so I've seen some NaNoWriMo videos
going around here on authortube and I'm not gonna say names, for most of them I
don't even remember who posted them. but I have seen a couple with the title
"writing a book in a month" and that ties directly into number eight which is
don't do NaNoWriMo if you expect to come out of that single month with a finished
book or even a clean draft. Just please, no. No. No. Just no. You can't write a book
in a month. Maybe a novella. Maybe a novella. But you can't write a good book
in a month. You just can't. Especially if you're a student or a parent or you're
disabled which impedes your writing or you have a full-time job or you have
other hobbies or other responsibilities or so many other things. Even if you
write 50,000 words in a month 50,000 words does not a novel make because they
have to be 50,000 good words. They have to be coherent. They have to be edited
and processed and have story. And quality matters over quantity please believe me.
When it comes down to it, readers care about quality more than they do
quantity and therefore as a writer you have to care about that same thing and
you're not going to output a quality book in a month. It's not gonna happen.
So when you see those videos out there on YouTube that are like "write a book in
a month" interpret that as write a very rough draft in a month because that is
possible. You can do that. And most importantly we come to number nine, you
should not participate in NaNoWriMo if failure tears you down. Sseeing that
number at the end of the month of Nano... Seeing that you didn't hit that fifty
thousand... Seeing other people celebrating that they won NaNoWriMo... If that's gonna
break you and make you feel like you're not worthy of being a writer or you're
not good enough then you should just avoid NaNoWriMo entirely. It's not worth
it. It really isn't. I mean if failing NaNoWriMo is gonna
make you depressed then odds are you're not gonna be outputting good amounts of
words for months to come until you pull yourself out of that depression and
ultimately you're gonna end up outputting less words than if you skipped
NaNoWriMo and only wrote 10,000 words that month but wrote 10,000 words for
the next four months after that instead of feeling depressed and struggling with
yourself. Alright that was my video on nine
reasons why you shouldn't NaNoWriMo. Stay tuned for next week where I'm
gonna do nine reasons why you should NaNoWriMo because there is a flip side
to this. But if any of the reasons today applied to you definitely think very carefully
before you join. Don't take this decision lightly if it's going to impact your
mental health, because your mental health comes first. If you liked this
video make sure to give it a share and a thumbs up. If you're not subscribed already,
subscribe down below hit that bell. If you want to very closely follow my
journey through NaNoWriMo you can become a patron at Cloud Kitten Chronicles on
patreon .There is a discord chat involved with Thunder Kittens and above and I'm
going to be very active on discord hopefully posting my word counts that
I'm hitting and all that good stuff and maybe post a couple vlog videos on
patreon.So go become a patreon you'll have a front row seat to my either succeeding
or failing, and we'll see which it's going to be. I don't know yet. So thank you guys so
much for watching and as always I will see you in next video.