Once again inspired by Friend of The Toast Emily Gould. (Previously: Male Novelist Jokes.)
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: The world needs your novel.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: They’re all gonna laugh at you.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Cool story, bro.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no p
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Hi! It looks like you’re trying to write a novel. Would you like help?”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Your novel gains strength as you grow steadily weaker. One day you wake up and it will bear your name; you will be nothing and no one and it will wear your face and the ones you love will not know you.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Just staple a bunch of Post Secrets together and pour yourself a drink.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: a thousand voices whispering at once: Hello, Dan.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Because Sherlock isn’t going to make out with Jeeves and Wooster in the hovercraft from Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow without your help.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: There are 3.7 trillion novels in the ocean. We’re looking for one.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: You write. You write. We know you’ll write.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: If you capitalize something that isn’t normally capitalized, everyone will know that it’s science fiction.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: You’re brave. You’re all brave. Tell each other how brave you are.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: What if Piper from Orange is the New Black and Liz Lemon were…best friends?”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: You’ve been missing for thirteen days.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Something sleeping in the sea knows your name.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. It is finished.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: The Carriage can hold but just ourselves.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: For every 1000 words you miss, we’ll kill a hostage.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Die with your boots on.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Sometimes, you take things from other people, just to feel alive.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: I can’t believe I wrote the whole thing.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Everybody’s dead, Dave.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: House Jordayne: Let It Be Written.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Carthage Must Be Destroyed.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “Why not just rewatch 30 Rock on Netflix again?”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Here is cruel Frederick, see!
A horrid wicked boy was he;
He caught the flies, poor little things,
And then tore off their tiny wings,
He killed the birds, and broke the chairs,
And threw the kitten down the stairs;
And oh! far worse than all beside,
He whipped his Mary, till she cried.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: All the nations of Europe are subject to you.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “Saving lives with your novel about How I Met Your Mother characters with slightly different names.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: Let your novel be written, though the world perish.”
National Novel Writing Month
November 1-30 | “NaNoWriMo: One dream. Four Jamaicans. Twenty below zero.“
Tags: did you spot the when harry met sally quote, nanowrimo, novels, taglines, the world needs your novel, writing
Editors, agents and their Slush Readers are currently stocking up on booze, ready for the unedited NaNovels that will flop down on their desks on December 1st.
Never mind them – just hope that smashwords has its servers in good shape for all the self-pub it’ll be processing.
December ought to be NaNoPleMo: National Novel Please-Revise-Before-Submitting Month.
NaNoPleYe
National Novel Please-Revise-Before-submitting-YEAR
“NaNoWriMo: For every 1000 words you miss, we’ll kill a hostage.”
My favorite. I am lazy and need motivation. (Er…I think I’ve just admitted that hostages will be killed.)
Lucky for you the hostages are just popsicle sticks with googly eyes.
Oh. My NaNo novel is doomed, then. I’d figured that by the fifth bloody body, I’d be able to work up the required motivation.
Clippy! I haven’t seen ol’ Clippy in a while. You know what, Clippy? I would like your help. You see, this morning my character was driving down the road in a used blue pickup, and her passenger proposed a partnership, and she’s wary but sees the benefits. But then I had to go to work. Can you just have them discuss it a little (witty dialogue, obv!) and have him earn her reluctant agreement before they get to the dump? (They’re going to the dump. Never mind why, I already established that.) KTHXBYE!
YES! We need a “Dear Clippy” column for NaNoWriMo.
Dear Clippy: I’m having trouble getting my teenage lesbian heroine into a situation where she can be almost-raped by seductive-but-evil Johnny, a child trafficker. She just refuses to become a victim every time I sit down to write that part. Should I drug her or something?
Rent the movie Hard Candy and watch for inspiration.
Dear Clippy,
My antagonist is trying to bring back the Elder Gods and kick off the apocalypse, but that seems a rather counter-productive goal. How do I tweak his motivation so that it’s something less stupid than “Bwa ha ha, I will cause the end of the world! And then I will be the ruler of…um…huh. I didn’t really think this one through, did I?”
Kthx!
I dressed up as our old helpful friend for Halloween a few years ago. People were incredibly confused about how to react. It basically boiled down to “Oh, god I hate you and love your costume but hate you please go away.”
“You write. You write. We know you’ll write.” I see what you did there.
One day. One day I will be the first to comment about spotting the WHMS quote.
WHY would you suggest several hilarious fanfic ideas that I now want you to write. There are lives at stake here. I guess I’ll just go watch more 30Rock on Netflix now.
AHH the Checkers speech!! I always wondered if Pat ever got a fur coat.
Oh god, Nixon’s NaNovel.
A man with a Checkered past.
NaNoWriMo “the perfect combination of personal defeat and the beginning stages of seasonal affective disorder to turn you into a weeping ball of misery!”
NaNoWriMo: ADVERBS EVERYWHERE
I AM SO GUILTY OF THIS AND I DO NOT CARE
“And gerunds,” she replied, sighing unhappily.
“And you just know the adverbs will be redundant,” he said swiftly.
What is it about novels particularly that makes people think it’s something anyone can (and should) do? I mean why don’t we have National Paint a Cathedral Ceiling Month? Or at least National Make a Song Month?
People want to believe they can write, more than they want to believe they can carve jade figurines or paint landscapes.
I think National Make a Song month would be pretty cool, actually. It’s a lot less of an ask to be like “Hey check out this song I made” versus “Read my terrible 900 page novel!”
There’s actually a NaNoWriMo, type thing for musicians, it’s called February Album Writing Month (FAWM). 14 songs in 28 days. It’s grueling but rewarding. plus there’s opportunity to do challenges and collabs with other musicians. I did it in 2011 and 2012, but I took last year off.
wait why *don’t* we have a National Paint a Cathedral Ceiling Month? and what is the procedure for change? does anyone know who is in charge of the months?
If “All the nations of Europe are subject to me”, I’d probably just let them all do their thing but commandeer a villa on the coast (Italy or Spain), institute a vineyard tax payable in wine directly to me and maybe have them build me a pirate ship? Yes. I also would take a month a year and live in the Musee D’Orsay because it is perfection.
:cries:
I know NaNoWriMo results in a lot of eagerly-banged-out absolute dreck, but I think anything that encourages people to actively participate in an art form instead of being passive consumers is a net win for the world, on some bullshit existential level. That said, I have trawled the NaNo forums…and somebody is cutting and pasting the recipe for every foodstuff mentioned in their ‘novel’ in order to boost their word count and win. And somebody is straight up re-writing Phantom of the Opera, Andrew Loyd Webber songs included (but they “don’t want it to be a rip off”? ???).
My favorite regular source of NaNo-hate is bestofnanowrimo.tumblr.com. But on the whole, I really do support the intentions of the project, and have participated for the last three years (the thing is, I don’t inflict my shit drafts on anyone).
I love the idea of it and I have got myself, at the very least, a few decent rough drafts out of the years I’ve participated. I think people get *too caught up* on the wordcount thing and ignore the purported reasoning for the project – to get you writing, with the forced wordcount preventing the ‘I don’t know what to write and I suck!’ making you freeze up.
I don’t think I’d ever have seriously got off the ground writing if it weren’t for Nano, but the idea that whatever is written during Nano is worthwhile without serious revising…
Exactly! I really do like NaNo’s ethos of “banishing your inner editor” and writing on a daily basis. That’s a great way to bang out a (verrrrry) rough draft. It works for any daunting writing project, really; my dissertation proposal was a lot easier to poop out after doing NaNo. And I think the sheer practice made me a better writer overall. It’s more about the process than about the word count goal or the finished product, I think. I don’t see what the point is in gaming the nanoword count system so you can “win”, but goddamn are their forums full of tricks designed to do exactly that. Spaces between each period in an elipsis, no contractions, long character names, meticulous descriptions of neverything, insane quantities of em dashes…
Hmm. Exactly. If that’s the way you want to ‘win’, more power to ya, but I’d prefer to have less than 50k, but more that I could use in the final piece.
Not doing it this year, I don’t have the energy.
Definitely! I would file NNWM in the “mostly harmless” category.
Remember when that guy had a robot pull in random words from all over the internet and string them together and “wrote” over a million words and everyone lost their shit
I have nothing to add I just want to bask in that
(Confession: I signed up for NaNo as a motivation to write more regularly, not necessarily as a motivation to write A Novel, but good lord the inexplicable competition)
Hmm. Exactly. If that's the way you want to 'win', more power to ya, but I'd prefer to have less than 50k, but more that I could use in the final piece.
Not doing it this year, I don't have the energy.
"And gerunds," she replied, sighing unhappily.
I know I’m going to get flack for this, but I’m ODing on “everybody on the internet hates everything anybody has ever enjoyed at some point in their lives” at the moment. Why all the hate against NaNoWriMo and amateur writers (amateur anything really)? Is trying really such a Bad Thing? Cripes. You know all those books in the library? You know who wrote those? PEOPLE.
HOMONYMS? VERY TRICKY. VERRRRRRY TRICKY.
Every year when November rolls around, I misread “NaNoWriMo” as “nanaimo” and spend the next month researching bar cookie recipes.