NaNoWriMo

November 1 approaches and with it another month of NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. In fact this month begins the 11^th year of this (free) enterprise.

I played in ’07 and ’08 and plan to join again this year.

Each year dedicate folks from all over the ‘verse (to steal a phrase from Joss Whedon) write 50,000 words in 30 days. That works out to 1667 words each day. And in the process the goal is to write a story, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end. Many begin, many depart early, but somehow many complete their stories.

Or at least manage to pump out 50K words!

The end result always lacks something, but that’s fine. It’s a first draft!

Most NaNoWriMo folk are pure amateurs (just doing this ‘for the love of the game’), but a few pros crop up every year. They seem to use NaNoWriMo as a tool for cranking out the ‘next one.’

And no one expects to produce perfections. In fact one of the consistent and repeated suggestions to Newbies is to shut off the delete button.

If the word you just used seems wrong… well, just go on, fix it later. When counting words, every word counts.

Most of us remember those assignments in school, the ‘write a 500 word essay on widgets’ kind where we used a lot of padding to get it done. Well, NaNoWriMo allows that sort of thing. We thrive on this!

In fact, this year I intend to finish last year’s story (which, hmm, actually expanded on the first years story…) and then begin another story. And that’s just peachy keen.The only ‘rule’ being: begin at 12:00:01AM on Noverber 1 and finish at 11:59:59PM on November 30.

So, anyway, what I’m saying is that you still have time to link onto www.nanowrimo.org and join in this year. Don’t worry that you don’t have a worked out story-line. If you’ve the urge I suspect you’ve had a bunch of characters running around in your mind for a while (mine go back as far as 1975!), so just let ‘em loose and jot down what they do for the next 50K words or so.

You can always edit things back into shape in December….