Ever
heard of NaNoWriMo?
Yeah,
neither did I until a few years ago, when I joined a writer’s group in Columbia,
MD.
At
that point, I’d written four novels and was working on a fifth. Yet I guess I
was writing in a vacuum, because I never knew there was a National Novel
Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, or NaNo.
The
goal of NaNo is to write 50,000 words in a single month. Supposedly, 50,000
words is a whole novel. I strongly disagree with this, but perhaps it’s a
decent first draft of a whole novel if your first drafts tend to be bare-bones
details.
Regardless,
people shun friends, family and sanity in order to accomplish this,
participating in NaNo write-ins and keeping track of their work on
nanowrimo.org and such. They even go to “prep school” in the waning days of
October to learn how to best organize themselves for the writing road ahead.
Some
accomplish their goal of 50,000 words. Admittedly, most do not. You kinda can’t
have a life in order to exit this challenge victorious.
In
other words, yes, it’s a crazy idea to begin with and the writing community gets
even crazier about it. All for books they probably won’t ever finish and even
fewer will publish. So in the end, there’s no need for them to be pulling out
their hair over the issue.
Illustrating
that truth is a meme I found recently from 101reasonstostopwriting.com that
says: “NaNoWriMo: The challenge of an arbitrary target and deadline without the
burden of any expectation of quality.”
True
dat.
All
the same, I don’t think it’s a complete waste of time. How can it be when it’s
a chance to push yourself harder than you have been… to put down the remote,
set aside the excuses and just write already. And let’s face it, most of us
need that kind of motivation.
If
you need any advice on trying NaNo, check out the official National Novel Writing
Month website, www.nanowrimo.org, or
contact JDiLouie@InnovativeEditing.com.
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