NaNoWriMo!
Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 12:31PM in Inspiration, Process November is National Novel Writing Month, wherein you are challenged to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days. That's roughly 1,167 1,667 [thanks for the math assist, Nick!] words a day, every day.
I will not be writing 1,667 words every day. I will, however, be starting the aforementioned novel-length work and hopefully using the momentum of NaNoWriMo to overcome my natural resistance to, you know, finishing anything.
My plan is to continue doing these weekly prompts, but instead of creating new characters and situations each week, they'll be used to inform a chapter or a situation from the novel.
You can follow my progress here on the blog and also over at www.nanowrimo.org; my username is brandon.crose, and I'd love to see what you're working on!
Reader Comments (6)
Your estimate of 1,167 words per day is indeed rough; it's actually 1667 words a day. ;)
I did Nano a couple years ago and did complete the challenge, but I didn't carry that forward to finishing anything. I hope your project ends up differently!
I WILL FLATTEN YOU TO NOTHINGNESS YOU BENEATH THE BROBDINGNAGIAN PREPONDERANCE OF MY WORD-MASS.
Kisses.
Nick: It's called the "Unwritten Word," not the... uh, Uncalculated... Number. Anyway, thanks for the math. I'll consider consulting it in future posts. :-P Re: your previous NaNo attempt, was it burnout from "30 days and nights of literary abandon" that did you in, or the story itself?
John: Ha! I do not doubt it, if only because I had to Google "brobdingnagian."
It's all about word count, baby.
Brandon, re: your question. I was not so much burnt out as I'd written myself into a corner. I had a rough outline before I started that I knew would carry me 20,000 words in, and once that was done I kept plugging away to keep up with Nano's daily demands, without much of a plan. The result was something so different from my initial vision that I lost interest in completing/rewriting it.
This is also my fear, Nick. The words start to feel inevitable once they're written and you've reread them a few times. I wonder what would happen, though, if you threw out everything you hated after word 20,000 and started again from there?