This is a day late because yesterday I was writing. I will today also, but I just have time now to write this.
So here we are again. NaNoWriMo 2023. For those who do not know, NaNoWriMo means “National Novel Writing Month” and is put on by a nonprofit organization that…well, let me just quote from their website: “...provides tools, structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds — on and off the page.” They are a simply wonderful group of folks who encourage writing year-round, but November is their banner month.
The traditional challenge is as follows: for the month of November, write 50,000 words of a new novel. Now, they have all manner of ways for you to modify that basic challenge to suit your own desires, but at its foundation, that’s the challenge.
The group has a whole bunch of encouragement and tools to help you stay on track, and resources to help you year-round with your writing and the business side of writing as well. I’ve been a member since 2011, and have completed the challenge NINE times in total, the last SEVEN of those consecutive.
Beltrunner II: Aftermath was my 2020 project, so I have one example of a NaNoWriMo project turning into a published work.
There are numerous articles and opinions on the whole thing, not all of them glowing. Some folks think that we maybe don’t need a bunch of pikers hammering away at typewriters to generate awful writing. Others say that since the challenge is for 50,000 words, the site ends up generating a lot of half-finished novels that people either abandon or worse yet, submit to publishers incomplete. Still others point out, as I did above, that what you end up doing in NaNoWriMo will almost certainly never get published, at least not conventionally.
Finally are the folks who claim that trying to write that much that quickly will inevitably mean that almost all of what’s produced will be terrible. Strangely enough, the NaNoWriMo people themselves don’t disagree. In fact, on one of the NaNoWriMo posters I keep in my classroom, the statement “Make No Mistake: You Will Be Writing a Lot of Crap” is in boldface print.
So then why do this?
I can only answer for myself. It’s a good, simple, external motivator to turbocharge my writing. I write year-round, but do not yet possess the iron discipline to hold myself to absolutely unerring daily writing which produces 1,667 words a day. I have a full-time job, plus many other responsibilities and obligations. Sometimes, they just get in the way. During NaNoWriMo, it’s as if I give myself permission to put my writing on a higher priority. I can honestly say that there is significant overlap between what I do in November and what I can do in other months because of it.
Also, it’s a great way to smash through a block. If I’m blocked on a project (as I have been for some time on my current one) the artificial goals of NaNoWriMo can help me break through those blocks in my Quixotic need to “win” the challenge. In other words, I find it easier to write the crap that will either turn into quality writing, spark another good idea, or even be completely discarded as, well, crap. The point was, however, I broke the block.
So, even though I’m a day late in this post (but not a day late on NaNoWriMo!) I encourage any of you reading this to dive right in and get to typing!
Be seeing you!
So here we are again. NaNoWriMo 2023. For those who do not know, NaNoWriMo means “National Novel Writing Month” and is put on by a nonprofit organization that…well, let me just quote from their website: “...provides tools, structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds — on and off the page.” They are a simply wonderful group of folks who encourage writing year-round, but November is their banner month.
The traditional challenge is as follows: for the month of November, write 50,000 words of a new novel. Now, they have all manner of ways for you to modify that basic challenge to suit your own desires, but at its foundation, that’s the challenge.
The group has a whole bunch of encouragement and tools to help you stay on track, and resources to help you year-round with your writing and the business side of writing as well. I’ve been a member since 2011, and have completed the challenge NINE times in total, the last SEVEN of those consecutive.
Beltrunner II: Aftermath was my 2020 project, so I have one example of a NaNoWriMo project turning into a published work.
There are numerous articles and opinions on the whole thing, not all of them glowing. Some folks think that we maybe don’t need a bunch of pikers hammering away at typewriters to generate awful writing. Others say that since the challenge is for 50,000 words, the site ends up generating a lot of half-finished novels that people either abandon or worse yet, submit to publishers incomplete. Still others point out, as I did above, that what you end up doing in NaNoWriMo will almost certainly never get published, at least not conventionally.
Finally are the folks who claim that trying to write that much that quickly will inevitably mean that almost all of what’s produced will be terrible. Strangely enough, the NaNoWriMo people themselves don’t disagree. In fact, on one of the NaNoWriMo posters I keep in my classroom, the statement “Make No Mistake: You Will Be Writing a Lot of Crap” is in boldface print.
So then why do this?
I can only answer for myself. It’s a good, simple, external motivator to turbocharge my writing. I write year-round, but do not yet possess the iron discipline to hold myself to absolutely unerring daily writing which produces 1,667 words a day. I have a full-time job, plus many other responsibilities and obligations. Sometimes, they just get in the way. During NaNoWriMo, it’s as if I give myself permission to put my writing on a higher priority. I can honestly say that there is significant overlap between what I do in November and what I can do in other months because of it.
Also, it’s a great way to smash through a block. If I’m blocked on a project (as I have been for some time on my current one) the artificial goals of NaNoWriMo can help me break through those blocks in my Quixotic need to “win” the challenge. In other words, I find it easier to write the crap that will either turn into quality writing, spark another good idea, or even be completely discarded as, well, crap. The point was, however, I broke the block.
So, even though I’m a day late in this post (but not a day late on NaNoWriMo!) I encourage any of you reading this to dive right in and get to typing!
Be seeing you!
RSS Feed