Thirty days to finish a novel-length piece of writing. It’s a simple and compelling idea that gets millions of people writing like demons every November and beyond. But, in my opinion, what does more than anything else to make National Novel Writing Month so incredibly successful (300,000 participants each and every year) is the fact that most of us prefer the sprint to the long haul. We’re better at brief periods of intense focus and energetic effort to get things done, as opposed to patient, steady labour over longer periods.

Thinking about my own life, you can see that pattern in the way I approach everything from housework to business admin. I procrastinate and delay and finally give over an entire rainy Sunday to digging myself out of the hole I’ve made. From casual observation I believe I’m not unusual in working like this. And the organisers of NaNoWriMo seem to have come to the same conclusion, creating a short-term event that harnesses people’s natural preference for bursts of effort. In a way, November is the rainy Sunday of the year, so, it’s only fitting that it should be the month when we embark on these creative splurges.

To ensure that we keep our noses to the grindstone, the organisers have rather cleverly placed the emphasis on producing the maximum number of words. When you register and create a project, you have to specify the word count that you’re aiming to achieve. During the month, motivational emails from NaNoWriMo and forum chit-chat on their website drive you towards that magic number. And when you pass the finishing post, you have the opportunity to validate the length of your text and get a certificate. Basically, it’s all about producing plenty of words. Quality is supremely unimportant. In fact, you have full permission to write absolute twaddle so long as you get a novel-length text written.

At first glance, it might seem like a bit of a philistine attitude, but, as NaNoWriMo addicts are at pains to point out, you don’t have a finished novel at the end of the month – or at least it would be very surprising if you did. Rather, you have something that you can take in hand at a later stage – something for analysis and reshaping with your editor hat on. And maybe, after several more drafts, you do eventually turn it into something you’re proud of and feel you can share with the public.

That’s all fantastic, and it’s been spectacularly successful at getting people writing. But the thing is, there are some people who, even with that liberating permission to throw a bucket of absolute nonsense at the blank page, still find themselves stuck and unable to reach anything like a respectable word count for the month. And, reader, I have a confession to make, I was one of those people. I tried for two years on the trot to write a first draft of a novel during National Novel Writing Month and failed spectacularly both times. There was nothing stopping me writing. I had plenty of time at my disposal and a great novel idea in both cases. But I was terribly hung up on the idea that I should be producing something that resembled a readable and entertaining story first time round. However, in my third year I did finally manage to reach my word limit, and it was simply because I made a small change in my way of thinking.

The change was that I stopped using the word ‘draft’. I know it’s a word that’s supposed to suggest imperfection and a certain provisional quality, but let’s be honest with ourselves, we all have a vain hope that somehow magically, we will be the first author in the existence of the universe to produce a first draft that is pretty darned perfect, requiring only a few tweaks and a spellcheck to become publishable material. It’s almost inevitable for two reasons. Firstly, we’re all lazy to some degree and we want to complete the mammoth task of writing a novel in as few stages as possible. Secondly, by using the same word – ‘draft’ – to describe the first document we produce (the manic splurge of ideas) and the last document we produce (the polished, print-ready manuscript) we create a fatal confusion in our own minds.

Before making my third attempt at NaNoWriMo, I started thinking about other models of the creative process – ways of looking at it that didn’t confuse your first attempts with your final product. I’ve always felt that writing, as a creative discipline taught in a variety of formal and informal settings, has a lot to learn from the other arts. That’s the principle behind my Popular Fiction Masterclass series, which encourages aspiring authors to study the works of bestsellers like a renaissance artist studying the sculptures of the ancient Greeks.

My first suggestion for breaking down the idea of the ‘first draft’ into something more manageable is to see it as a sort of quarrying process. Long before Michelangelo began carving his legendary sculpture of David, for example, he set about finding the perfect block of marble. Naturally, he had a reasonable idea of the shape and proportions of the block that he needed, but to some extent, the block that he eventually chose to work with exercised a degree of influence over the final result. You could say, in fact, that the quarryman – and before him the geological forces that produced the marble – had a good deal of influence over the masterpiece that now stands in the Accademia gallery, Florence. Naturally, the quarryman didn’t have an artistic vision as such, but he did, presumably, have a knack for connecting with artists, understanding their overall needs and then hacking out a piece of material that would enable them to exercise their genius. That’s what you’re doing at the earliest stages of your novel-writing process – you’re hacking a block of promising, roughly story-shaped ideas out of your mind.

Here’s a second idea. To bear in mind if you’re stuck during national novel writing month. A lot of writers of popular music tend to use jamming as a way of producing ideas for songs. The legendary guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen has said that he always has his instrument plugged into an amplifier so that he can just pick it up and start playing around with riffs and tunes while he does something else. That is another way of looking at the ‘first draft’ – as jamming. It’s not an imperfect attempt to write a finished novel, it’s a successful attempt to produce exciting material by riffing on themes that interest you or stimulate your imagination in some way. Subsequent stages of the process will handle the more formal aspects of writing the novel, just as a musician like Malmsteen will take their ideas and shape them into a finished track – at the right time.