Thursday, October 12, 2006

Giving NaNoWriMo Another Go!

Most of you probably know that November is National Novel Writing Month, or "NaNoWriMo" for short. Well, maybe most of you don't know that. If you didn't, now you do. At this point I'm just writing words so that this first paragraph will cover the entirety of the small pic on the right.

The folks over at NaNoWriMo are yet again leading us in an attempt to write a single 50,000 word novel during the month of November. For those of you who don't write much, you may think this sounds like a lot of words. You would be correct.

To give you an example of how many words that actually is, up to this point in my current post, I have written 120 words. Imagine that times 416.66666666666666666... That should give you a clear idea of what we're talking about here.***

Insane? Probably. Worth trying? Maybe. Possible? Definitely, but it depends on who we're talking about. I tried this two Novembers ago and failed miserably. Not sure how far along I actually got, but I imagine I was at least 25,000-35,000 words short.

It was still a lot of fun though. The fun thing is that the point is just to get yourself writing. Most of the stuff turns out to be crap, which may have nothing to do with a one month deadline and more to do with my writing ability. You just have to keep typing and rambling, much like I'm doing now. But you don't look back, don't worry if it makes no sense, just get it done. At least that's how I see it. And I still failed.

So I'm going into it this year with my bar set very low. That way I won't feel like a failure. And that's how naturally negative people think, for those of you optimists out there.

I encourage any and all of you to join in the fun. I'm thinking pirates this year. Good luck to those of you brave enough to face your own failures. Let me know if you join and what you're planning to write about.

***- If you actually do the math above, you will end up one word short. So add one word to your imagination and you will have an even better idea of how many words we're talking about.

1 comment:

This is the field trip said...

i "won" nanowrimo for three years and tried again last year but fizzled after a week. for me the key was to front load, write more than the average daily allotment for the first coupla weeks because by week three it was ugh. i'm going for it this year again, have a little gimmick in mind to give me a little scaffolding. order yourself a teeshirt and then it's too embarassing to not finish. good luck!