2006-11-13

NaNoWriMo

It's National Novel Writing Month. The project was designed to overcome the idea that a 50,000-word novel is an insurmountable task that no amateur author could ever hope to complete in his or her lifetime. But over a month it's just 1650 words a day - the length of a college essay, if memory serves (and plenty of those took less than a day).

Shig invited to me to pair up with him so we could spur each other on but, sadly, I was compelled to decline. I feel like I'm struggling to stay on top of life right now, so now is no time to take on a new commitment. Ten-out-of-ten for sensible decision making but minus several million for fun.

Shig's been quiet online of late so I assume he's deep into it. Good luck! And don't worry if you end up writing a lot of stream-of-consciousness crap because March is NaNoEdMo.

posted by thisismarcus @ 17:53 

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks! I should of course be writing the damn thing right now. My God, it's rubbish; it may be redeemable with plenty of editing come March or whenever, but I rather doubt it. All the people I know who are doing it, whatever kind of book they're writing in whatever genre, we're all saying the same thing: there is no easy way to do it. It is a steep and revealing learning curve, and it's tough, but I'm so going to do it again next year.
And, having got all this serious guff out of my system this year, next November I heartily intend to write about space aliens.

11:11  
Blogger Basquiat Scrawls said...

Wow, i wish i had a month to spend writing a novel, although i guess the romanticism of the whole idea might not carry me through. I imagine cycles of enthusiasm to apathetic lack lustre and on to depair and self loathing and back to reinstated hope. I hope you're getting a good dose of the enthusiasm, and now i should get on with my 1600 words for the day, unfortunately mine are on the WTO and depressingly non-fictional!

11:52  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I should stress that I haven't stopped doing any of the things I normally do this month (if anything, it's been a busy month for me both in and out of work, not counting the fiction). It's basically a time-management thing: can you make about an hour and a half a day (which is roughly what it boils down to if you can type pretty fast) to bash out 1667 words of fiction, of whatever quality, for a month?

You are spot on in your analysis of the peaks and troughs. Week 2 is a real low point, and most of the participants drop out. But I'm on a real high from it today approaching the end of week 3, going great guns.

If you are interested, you should have a look at the NaNoWriMo website or even invest a fiver in a copy of the founder's book, which is as good as its title--"No Plot? No Problem"--suggests.

31,743 words and counting!

23:42  
Blogger Basquiat Scrawls said...

well done keep it up! will definately find out more but next year i will be frantically writing two dissertations so the novel might have to wait till 2008. Actually met someone else down here in brighton doing it yesterday. i like the idea of lots of people going through the trauma all at the same time, makes the pain bearable i should think!

20:20  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Finished! I was getting fed up of the damn thing, so I crashed through from 37,000 at the start of Friday morning to 50,000 last night. Now I have the skeleton of a rubbish novel to play with, but maybe it will become less rubbish as flesh and muscle are added to the bones.

10:23  

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