National Novel Writing Month

Can you write 50,000 words in 30 days?

You can find out if you try National Novel Writing Month.

Call it nanowrimo for short. The folks who started the crazy enterprise say it 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."

I've tried nanowrimo three years and succeeded twice. This year, I'm going for it again.

Two keys things equal a high word count.

1) Get rid of the internal editor. You know the one who lives in your head and tells you can't, shouldn't, couldn't, nope, not good enough, make it better, better than better, sorry it's not perfect. If you don't have one of these lovelies, you are a lucky, lucky writer.

My internal editor is a sharp lady, about a 105, with ruthless taste. She is sometimes mean and nasty. I imagine she only has two bad teeth. The other 30 teeth are long gone, lost in multiple verbal brawls. She loves red ink. She can paralyze me at times, but I've become good at converting her into a force for the good because who would want to read raw, clunky, and baaaaaaaaaad writing? However, even internal editors need vacations. So for the month of November, I gear up and hunker down. I've got to get 2,000 words a day which can take anywhere from 1.5 to 2 hours. No time for my internal editor, which brings me to the second key point.

2) Ignore everything and anything which would take you away from getting your writing done. This may include but is not limited to: dishes, laundry, the really good book your friend told you to read, TV shows you like or don't, phone calls, online forums (they are a dangerous black hole sucking up anything coming near them!), and people in general. My personal favorite thing to ignore is sleeping, but this creates some interesting problems during the daytime.

Everyone may have their own best advice. Certainly the folks putting on the show, who maintain the National Novel Writing Month website do a great job of keeping you going. But really, the long and the short of writing a novel is you have to spend the time writing and writing and writing and writing the novel.

Nanowrimo is a just the hyperdrive way to do it.

Any takers?