Isaac Asimov said, "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
You, however, are luckier. First of all, you probably have way more than six minutes to live. Plus, you have way more than six minutes to deadline: You have a whole month, to be precise. A whole, entire month, to write ::insert drum roll:: your very own novel! (Well, actually, it's more of a novella, but let's not get hung up on details.)
November is National Novel Writing Month, A.K.A. NaNoWriMo. Na No What-o?, you may ask. From the website:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly ... (click to continue.)
Thousands of writers around the world will spend November hunkered down over big, steaming piles of hasty prose, chugging caffeine and sharing the experience in online forums. Sounds like a good time to me.
If you want to play, be sure to sign up by October 31. There's a cool little logo thingy you can put on your blog for the month. And if you actually manage to hit the 50,000 word goal, you get bragging rights and a badge of honor. In other words, it's about the journey, not the destination. Really, isn't everything?
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3 comments:
vicki, thanks for the nudge. you'd think what with it being every november, and with it being that my birthday is every november, that i'd remember nanowrimo. but i'm the girl that is flummoxed every year to discover that christmas is in december this year?!? dammit, sigh. grins, debra
Hi Debra! Apparently, I signed up last year for an automated email reminder, which arrived a couple of days ago. If this were in any other month but November (or December), I'd be all over it. Hats off to ya, if you're doing it!
Vicki
There's something about the NaNoWriMo concept that sends me screaming for the hills, and I don't quite know why. That said, I approve of setting out a month for sustained writing effort, and a friend of mine wrote a draft of her novel a year or two ago, setting her own schedule based on whenshe would be off work anyway recovering from surgery. No Nano for me, but I think I'll use it as an excuse to force myself to get serious with my fiction again. How can I expect to get published if I don't make the effort?
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