Yesterday marked the kickoff of National Novel-Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), the online project that challenges participants to write a 50,000-word book in the 30 days of November. To those scribbling hurriedly to meet its deadline, we wish you a book deal by December. And to cheer you on, we’ve rounded up a treasure trove of advice and encouragement from the great writers who best embody, in their own work, NaNoWriMo’s goals of writing much and writing fast. Below the jump, read through our favorite words from the wise, speedy, and prolific.
Jack Kerouac: “You’re a Genius all the time”
One of the central aims of NaNoWriMo is to encourage writers to trust their abilities — not to look back and scrutinize every detail of their prose but to look forward and trust their pens (or laptops) to spit out rapid gold. This is what Kerouac did, no doubt, when he jotted down the Beat bible On the Road in a mere three weeks on a 120-foot scroll of paper, and why we chose to highlight the 29th axiom of the 30 writing tips in his strangely spelled, hardly punctuated, partially coherent “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” below. “You’re a Genius all the time,” he instructs (and with a capital G, no less!); you’ve got to believe it if your publisher will.
Comments (9)
Stephen King is the only one with advice applicable to anyone wanting to write: read everything. Prolific or Pynchonian, short stories to epic tomes.
I met a holocaust survivor and he said he hated ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’
He said that no nazi gaurd would have let anyone near a fence and that ‘The Boy in the Striped pyjamas’ would have been shot for doing so
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Elle — I disliked _The Boy in Striped Pajamas_ as well. Completely unrealistic, having those two boys meet on either side of an unguarded (!) fence every day. And the way the German commander’s kids knew NOTHING about the concentration camp, though they lived close enough to see thin folks in “PJs”? Ridiculous, and disrespectful of kids’ intelligence.
Dana — Thanks for the inspiration, but I bowed out early this year. I think, for teachers, there should be a special NaNo in July or August, don’t you?
[...] Vrei să te apuci de scris? Iată ce te sfătuiesc scriitori precum Kerouac sau Stephen King. [...]
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The story about “On the Road” being written in three weeks is a myth. “OtR” was built upon drafts and outlines that he had been working on for years. The first draft was indeed written in three weeks on that long roll, but it then went through several revisions before being published.
[...] Writing Advice from History’s Most Prolific Authors Sit back and soak this one in. Yes, this is advice from writers of fiction, but it’s all grist for the mill. Really. [...]
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