Nanowrimo 2007 just around the corner
Published by on September 20th, 2007
The National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as Nanowrimo, starts once more on November 1st. This time last year, I was considering taking part. Last December, I was quietly close to being determined to take part in 2007.
Writing, like any other creative endeavour, needs a good firm deadline to stir the productive juices - note the use of ‘productive’ and not ‘creative’. If that deadline is not entirely self imposed, then it has a much greater chance of influencing activity.
Nanowrimo offers a kind of group therapy to writers. A single month each year where the task is to complete an entire novel of at least 50,000 words, between the 1st and 30th of November. Last year around 13,000 writers managed to complete the task, with all 72,000 participants cumulatively generating a word count of 982,564,701!
Nanowrimo encourages quantity over quality, breaking that fatal loop of too much editing too early. Getting down 50,000 words in 30 days means 1666 words per day, which is no mean feat day after day. Quality will inevitably go out of the window, but that’s the point: if you succeed, at the end of the month you will have the first draft of a complete novel, all ready to be edited. Even if a lot of it is ultimately discarded, I would put money on it that buried in amongst the waffle are enough gems to generate new ideas, news stories, even new novels. For the budding novel writer, there are no down sides apart from a one month of their life is a bit busier. To me that’s a no-brainer.
So will I do it? Actually, I might. I’m 30,000+ words into the first book of the Table Rappers series right now, so that does not count - it has to start from scratch on November 1st by the Nanowrimo rules. But there’s the second Table Rappers to be started (and the third, fourth, fifth, sixth…), plus a completely separate story I have outlined. Plenty of options, and still plenty of time to make a decision whether to participate.
