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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.