Can’t Find Time to Write?
National Novel Writing Month
It starts in two weeks.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) was started in July 1999 to get people interested in writing. For those who haven’t tried it, this is a writing event held every year in November. NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write 50,000 words of original prose in that month. When it started, they were more specific about writing an actual novel. In the last few years, they have loosened that up to include pretty much whatever the participants want to write. Success is self-reported. If you cheat, you are only cheating yourself.
Winning at NaNoWriMo is pretty straightforward. You work out for yourself how to write 50,000 words in one month. A common way to break that down into smaller chunks is that you can achieve the goal if you just write 1667 words per day, every day, for the month.
There is an excellent write-up on the history of NaNoWriMo at wikiwrimo.org. I have been participating off and on almost since it started. I have missed a few years here and there for various reasons. I know, laziness probably doesn’t count as a “reason” as such. In 2006, I had to drop out because I had to have my gall bladder out. That bad gall bladder came with a side order of inflamed liver and pancreatitis.
When I get sick, I don’t do it in half measures. My wife used to kid me about needing frequent flyer points for my emergency room visits. NaNoWriMo just wasn’t going to happen that year. Something about being in the hospital for a week in excruciating pain when I wasn’t passed out on morphine just made it difficult to write. After that, lesser excuses just seem lame.
For the most part, though, nearly every year I started NaNoWriMo, I have actually managed to finish. NaNoWriMo has an active, enthusiastic, and very supportive community. When there’s no pandemic on, they even do in-person meets for writing sessions. A lot of that is done virtually for now.
I have been having a good time exploring the essay format this year and do not want to take the time to write a novel. I was going to skip NaNoWriMo this year, but instead, I will participate by committing to writing an essay a day for the month of November. In looking over my essays here on Medium, it looks like most of my writing is in the 1000–2000 word range, putting it squarely in NaNoWriMo’s daily word count goals.
The project I am going to register for this year’s event will be a book of essays. I will not publish it all at once, but it will let me bank some posting material for future publication on Medium. If you have trouble finding that motivation to sit down and write every day, NaNoWriMo could help with that. Another nice benefit is that after you have been writing daily, or nearly so, for a month, you will have a really good writing habit set that could nudge you towards greater productivity.
NaNoWriMo officially starts as soon as midnight rolls over on the night of October 31st. The second November 1st arrives, many people start writing. It is loads of fun and is something I have always found worthwhile.
