author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

...which won't exactly top the charts as a big band swing pop tune, but it sounds like it ought to be one, at least. The long story is, they're replacing the floors in the laundry rooms of my building, so in the meantime I have to take my dirty clothes to the laundromat in Diagonal Plaza. Last night I took my novel draft over there along with two loads of St. John's Bay jeans and Hanes Her Way undies and the rest of the fauna.

So, whee for me. I ended up hacking out some 1500 words from the very beginning of the book. X. Cut. Gone. Well - those pages have been set aside to be mined for redeemable material at a later date, anyway. But still.

Admittedly, they did have to go - they were fine examples of my ability to waste oodles of text in getting characters from point A to point B. Great word-padding for NaNoWriMo, but not very good substance for a novel. Which leads me to the following conclusion. You ready for this? OK, here we go: NaNoWriMo is not necessarily good for your first draft.

No no no really. Let's try that again, and more accurately: NaNoWriMo only produces workable first drafts if the author begins with the goal of a workable first draft. There. That's somewhat less extreme.

See, if you bop around the forums, you will see all manner of unhealthy suggestions offered on the assumption that those reading care only about crossing a 50K-word finish line, and not about which 50K words cross that line with them. Suggestions such as, "write a scene involving ninjas! You can fit ninjas into any story!" And, "do a find and replace on all your contractions - 'do not' is two words!" And, "Expand all your acronyms! 'International Business Machines' is three times the wordage of 'IBM'!"

Suggestions like those remind me of coffee and cigarettes and all-night writing sprees when what your body really needs are a nutritious meal and a good night's sleep. Not that the occasional all-nighter isn't a useful way of challenging yourself, understand, but what I'm talking about here is the difference between a torturous one-month marathon that leaves you unwilling to run for a whole 'nother year, and a month of solid, healthy running practice. Some NaNoWriMo participants only want to run that marathon and then go back to the couch all year, so to speak, and that's OK for them. Me, I want my November production to be part of lifelong writing career. So NaNoWriMo has to be fun, not torture, and it has to produce a draft I can be proud of.

Thus, my goals for NaNoWriMo are a little more stringent than those of many other NaNoWriMoers:

• I have to tell a story that I'm willing to live with after November.

Which is not to say that it has to come out so perfect that I never get the "OhMyGodThisSucks" creeping horrors. But it does have to interest me. It has to fascinate me. To the point of obsession. The story has to want to be told - and even if my skin crawls at the idea of anyone reading it now, I have learned to trust that obsession as a reliable symptom of a story worth telling.

• I have to tell that story, and not tell around that story.

Yes, in a pinch I'll write some Point A to Point B prose of the sort I had to hack out last night. But if what I want is a potential novel, I have to do so not with the goal of simple word-padding, but in the spirit of exploration. I'm taking my character from Point A to Point B on the hope that something truly necessary to the story will show up at Point A-and-a-half.

• Lastly, I have to write as though I'll want to read it later.

Again, this doesn't mean that every sentence comes out a polished pearl. But it does mean that I'm not going to go out of my way to choose the wordiest phrase. And the backspace key is not verboten (though its use should be sparing, to be sure).

In short, a NaNoWriMo undertaking, for me, has to resemble in some ways the first draft of a short story. From the beginning, the hope is to produce a first draft - not just a 50K-word ramble. This of course means that I'll be heartbroken if November's output turns out to be unredeemable after all. I've got more at stake than I would otherwise. But it's having stakes in the matter that gets me to the finish line. And I've survived broken hearts before.

Hell, I've had to rip five hours of knitting back into a ball of yarn. I know all about surviving heartbreak.

OK, time to unravel another 15 rows of lace... *grooooan*