Welcome to National Novel Writing Month, affectionately known as NANOWRIMO.
What’s the point of Nanowrimo? The point is simply to write. To get words on paper. They don’t even have to be the greatest words; revision comes later, but certainly not during the month of November. 🙂 It’s sort of a “just do it” thing.
Write for the pleasure, the joy, the rush of getting the story on
paper. Write even if you don’t know how. Write even if you’ve never written anything before. Just put some words on paper.
I like what the website says:
“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. Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s
a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving
yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and
editing and just create. To build without tearing down.”
It breaks down to, what? 1,667 words a day? That’s about six and a
half double-spaced pages. It makes me think of James Scott Bell’s “Nifty 350.” Get up first thing in the morning and bang out 350 words. You might be surprised at what you get, and it will motivate you to keep moving. It gets you over the hurdle.
I’m looking at Nanowrimo as a break from the novel I’m working on now. I’m
going to do something different, something I haven’t tried before. I
give myself permission to fail if I fail, but to have a blast in the
process!. 🙂
Go and Nano, whether you’re a writer or not. You might find out, like a friend of mine really did, that you go from saying, “I’m not really a writer” to saying “Uh, I’m a writer!”
JB
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