November is National Novel Writing Month!
Nov 6th, 2007 by Nut
I did this last year and unfortunately won’t have time to participate again this year. It’s a great experience even though I never met with of personally talked to anyone in real life while I was doing it.
What is NaNoWriMo? Thousands of people sign up to write a 50,000 word novel in one month. You start from scratch on November 1st and go from there. The website has all kinds of communities and email lists to help people chat about it and swap stories (about writing, not novel stories). There are some pretty good blogs out there too about the experience.
What I found valuable about it: I didn’t make it to 50,000, but it was the first time in my life I dedicated time and energy to the same project, day in and day out, for a month. It took over my life.
“When/how am I going to get my 2,000 words in today?”
It was a lot of fun and I learned a ton about myself as a writer and about writing in general.
Like what? Like writing being an explorational thing. When you wake up every morning and plop yourself down in front of a piece of paper, you’re not ready to just start hammering out 2,000 words on a story you’ve been obsessing about. The details start to haunt you.
For my novel, I had an opening scene in my head—that was it. I didn’t know what happened before or after that, but I knew that was my starting point. After that you’re kind of going with the flow and as I wrote new things started to come up and I would write them down. I discovered things about my characters that I didn’t really “come up with,” I discovered them.
If it all sounds too new agey for you then you are probably the perfect candidate for NaNoWriMo. It’s a very enlightening experience.
I was just thinking the other day how Nanowrimo was a very good challenge for me. It helped me learn to write about the same subject(ish) for 30 days. When I was tired, when I felt uninspired, I still had to write because I made a commitment.
I would never read the “novel” I wrote or recommend that anyone else do so, but I look back on the experience as helping me break through a certain writing wall. To me, that was worth it.
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