The Introduction
Week 1. Day 1.
It’s November 1, which means today is the beginning of National Novel Writing Month. Today I am committing to writing over 70,000 words of a novel in 30 days.
In combination with finishing my 52 Week Writing Challenge for The Writing Cooperative, I wanted to document this journey as well. It’s an important one, and one I’m excited to complete. Hopefully I can achieve both goals simultaneously.
What is NaNoWriMo?
National Novel Writing Month is a writing challenge for anyone who has ever wanted to write a novel. It’s committing to write 50,000 words in 30 days with the support of other writers working towards the same goal.
You can create a profile, log your novel details on their website, and track your daily word count through your dashboard. There’s even an opportunity to validate your word count starting November 20th. Though NaNoWriMo is primarily designed for fiction writers, their resources page has some interesting prompts which can help jumpstart just about any plot line.
If you’d like to join in the challenge, I’ll be using this NaNoWriMo planner designed by Shayla Raquel of The Curiouser Author Network. It is a great resource to get started and a binder worth maintaining through project completion.
What tools I will be using?
My biggest asset is going to be Scrivener. I finally purchased a full product license and plan to use it to keep my notes and writing organized. I’ll also be using Evernote when I feel like writing on the road, but all I have is my phone.
Medium will be my personal, but very public, journal. I’ll take notes, write reflections, and update the article to include my word count for the week.
I’ve also created a separate NaNoWriMo user account on my laptop. The only things which are installed are Scrivener and Spotify. I have a very short attention span if there’s too much going on, so hopefully this will help create a distraction-free environment.
The Final Numbers
Writing Window:
15:00 to 18:51
Scrivener WC:
Total WC for the Week:
1, 959
