NaNoWriMo
I’ve decided to give NaNoWriMo a go. Not heard of it? It’s a crazy thing that’s been going for a few years now. The name stands for “National Novel Writing Month” (although “National” isn’t really accurate any more, given its worldwide membership) and the idea is that, during the month of November, you sign up to write 50 000 words of fiction – a short novel. You can’t write anything before the month starts, and you submit your result at the end for an automated word count to verify whether or not you’ve made the target.
What’s the point? Well, none really. It’s a simple kick in the pants to get going and actually do this thing. If you think, “How can you write something that’s any good in that time?” then you’re missing the point. The motto of NaNoWriMo is “Quantity, not quality!” That is, just sit down and write, and see what comes out. Learn about your story , your characters, your own skill. Simply writing a big chunk of text is worth it. A lot will be drivel, but you hope that there’ll be enough good stuff to be worth refining. And you certainly hope to have fun telling a story. You can join with other similarly mad people, encourage and commiserate with each other using the Forums, and generally have a laugh.
What am I writing? Well, I’ve been plotting a story entitled The Wolf and the Rose, which is a fantasy based in a world not dissimilar to our own, whose central character is trying to escape hard choices in his own life but finds himself instead struggling for his life with faerie, shapeshifters and kidnappers. I’m very unlikely to hit 50 000 words because I can’t spend that much time on it, but I do hope to get a significant proportion of the way there. My personal target is to finish the first section of the story, which would make a respectable novella of around 15 000 words. There are some other people around the blogosphere who I already link to who are joining in, including Tony from Storyteller’s World. Fancy joining in? There’s still a few days before the start of November!
Update
There are various progress-monitoring thingies around. I’ve converted one of these from its original Excel format to OpenOffice.org 2 format. You enter your current word count into the first column and the time you spend writing each day, and it will show you your percentage progress, how close you are to the necessary speed and graphs of your daily word count and word-per-minute rate. It’s all a bit of fun, anyway 
pax et bonum
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Add to your del.icio.us bookmarksNaNoWriMo final result
As I said previously, I took part in this year’s NaNoWriMo – an attempt to write a novel in just a month. Motto: quantity not quality The official target is 50 000 words, but my personal target was more in the region of 15&nbs…
Sent on 10:03pm on 03 December 2005 , via / musing / struggling / dreaming /
NaNoWriMo update 1
Nearly a week into NaNoWriMo, so I thought I’d bring anyone interested up to date. I’ve not really had a whole lot of time to write (as expected) but I’ve managed to get 5208 words written since Tuesday, so I’m well on my way …
Sent on 12:22am on 07 November 2005 , via / musing / struggling / dreaming /
tony () (URL)
10:12pm on 29 October 2005
Stephen () (URL)
10:56pm on 29 October 2005