Nanowrimo

November has Arrived. With November so does NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is the US National Novel Writing Month. This is the month where people spend every day writing 1,667 words per day, so that by the end of the month they have a draft of a novel. I have tried the challenge several times and completed it just once.

The challenge is to write, and ignore the inner censor. It’s the idea of thinking “This is crap” and “this is rubbish” and continuing to write anyway. The goal of NaNoWriMo is not to come out with a polished turd. It’s to get into the habit of writing, and ignoring the reflex of stopping. It’s about allowing ideas, and concepts, and more to flow, and to get to 50,000 words.

November is the month when a group of people try to write 1667 words per day for a month. they have write-in events, word sprints and many other gimmicks to encourage them to break the challenge into less daunting challenges. I didn’t even consider participating this year for a simple reason. This is my 360th day in a row of writing a daily blog post.

The Daily Blog Challenge

My challenge was less ambitious. My goal was to write at least three hundred words per day, every day, without taking days off. I didn’t allow myself to count a photo as a blog post because that would be too easy. I wanted to give myself a productive challenge.

As an introvert, I have a tendency to listen and daydream rather than talk. It is for this reason that the Nanowrimo challenge is an interesting one. It encourages me to be verbose, to use more words than I would usually use. It also forces me to find 1667 words of inspiration on a daily basis. This is a challenge. When you’re inspired it can take about an hour and a half to two hours depending on typing speed or it can be split into chunks. 

The Nanowrimo Challenge is interesting for me to challenge because I am an introvert. As part of this introversion I like to be concise and to the point. That’ why I like twitter conversations. Why say in one hundred and fourty words what you can say in one hundred and fourty characters? Trying to write one thousands six hundred and sixty seven words per day is very hard for me. It requires me to extend what I have to say. It requires me to elaborate and to answer the “So what?” question in more depth than usual. Every year I start November thinking about how I want to attempt and succeed and eventually I give up. The first year that I attempted NANOWRIMO I made it. I managed to write more than 50,000 words in a month. It was my first time writing fiction and my first time writing something so long winded. I never re-read what I wrote because I never found the courage. Interestingly enough I think that what I thought and wrote about a few years ago has become a reality. On other years the attempt failed because I found work and so had insufficient time and motivation to write for two hours a day. How convenient. ;-) This year I wanted to explore social networks and the history of how people interact on them, from web forums, deviant art and other forms of interactions to myspace, facebook and twitter. I want to look at how conversations went from being blog posts to being comments to being tweets to being silly emoji and eventually become a listening rather than a conversational medium. I believe that I am a textrovert. When I use the word textrovert I do not mean that I like to send text messages by phone as SMS. I mean that I like to get to know people via the written word before I meet people in person. I want to learn what I can converse about without worrying about other people listening in. I also dislike competing with other people for attention. Sometimes I want to have conversations with people but I struggle to engage them properly and so I go back to the written word. People don’t like the written word. They often feel that you are ignoring them by looking at your phone, by having a conversation with other people. If you have the intention of listening then you have the right to feel that people should put their phones down. If you only want to talk then do not be offended by people living in a text based world instead. We need to get back on track. I expect to gain two things from this month’s challenge. The first of these is that I expect to develop ideas in more detail than usual. Instead of using a single sentence I will fill in the gaps, provide context and relevant information. I will attempt to behave like a standard/normal person. Why say in ten words what you can say in two hundred words right? How can you do this whilst adding more information rather than going around in circles? I am out of my comfort zone. I feel that by writing far more than I need to write I am rambling, and I want to avoid rambling. At the same time as a camera operator and as a photographer I am used to creating more content than I need and then editing that content to something short and entertaining. When it’s with a video camera I do not worry about rambling because rambling provides me with more choice, more opportunities and more coverage. There is of course the small matter that when I take pictures or video I edit, and that with the written world I am less methodical. It is not that I don’t know how to edit but rather that as I write for pleasure I write for myself. People can read it if they like, and if I allow them to. Over the next month we will see how many ideas I explore and develop. We will see how I find 1667 words of inspiration every day for another 29 days. I expect that I will manage. I managed half a decade ago. I should manage again today. When I reach the fifty thousand word count I will feel good about it.

Tomorrow I will be in Lausanne once more, this time to meet the people from Bloggy Friday. It’s Switzerland’s bloggers and social media types coming together for a chat and the traditional fondue (or so it’s been for the past few weeks) and an opportunity to hear about new projects. Last month it resulted in me hearing about minsh and going to a demonstration of what the website will provide for users of twitter. i’m not going into details just yet but when it comes out some people might find it quite interesting. The second event is the TGIO (Thank goodness it’s over) party for the National Novel Writer’s month and the Swiss writers that participated. it’s a sleepover right next door to where I live and that will be interesting. The main event comin up is of course LeWeb which I will be attending this year through a great piece of luck. I’m looking forward to the presentations and meeting many new people. It should be an interesting to pick up ideas for how to develop and re-wrte some parts of the book I’m currently working on. The culmination of the week of course will be on Friday when 30 of the French Seesmic community will meet for a dinner. In all it’s going to be a very social media week and it’s refreshing for it to take place in a place like Paris. I will take some video and photographs and blog what I think is of interest. For now it’s a restful evening whilst looking forward to the fun week ahead.

Jub - Nov 0, 2008

Made it too! Thanks again for having mentioned it on twitter. It was a lot of fun to do it.

Congratulations Richard ! You are the best !!!

Congratulations!!

Well done ! you’re the best… :)

That’s it. I’ve made it. I wrote 50,000 words in 25 days, That’s an average of 2000 words a day for 25 days. That’s a lot of writing. That’s a lot of re-writing. It was fun meeting some of these writers over the past two weeks and I look forward to at least one or two more meetups. In the meantime I’m one of those that have completed the task. Let’s see how many others have achieved the goal.

I’m now at fourty five thousand words. I’ve written those words in just 24 days. That’s an average of 1875 per day. I have another 5000 to go and I will have reached the end of this year’s nanowrimo and that’s when the editing will start. [caption id=“attachment_837” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Almost at the end”][/caption]

Danacea - Nov 1, 2008

You’ve done a really storming job of this - good stuff! :)

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in Starbucks in Geneva but found no inspiration there. I was surrounded by NaNoWriMers from around Switzerland and a few of them were writing quite succesfully. some of us though just spent a few hours talking. That was good too. It’s only as I was driving home and looking at the road, the signs and the night drive that I found inspiration to write once I got home. The first thousand words came easily, within a short time they were down on paper. What I did struggle with were the second thousand words I had to write to get to my personal goal of fourty thousand. I was up till one am looking for inspiration. I wrote something, then re-wrote, finally I found the order I liked. I checked and there I was, at fourty thousand words in 22 days :-) I want to get the writing finished with. I really want to wrap up the story and start proofreading. There are certain chapters that need a lot of re-working and others that I could publish with just a tiny bit of re-working. I really want to make it readable, and I want to make sure the story is coherent. In five days I think I will have finished it properly :-), two thousand a day :-)