Today is the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in which participants are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. There aren’t too many other qualifications, including any that say you have to actually write a good novel.
I participated and completed the challenge a few years back. It boiled down to about 3,000 words a day, which I managed the first three days when it was easy and fun to write and then I took about a week off when plot and ideas dried up and eventually found myself, on November 30th at about 10:30 p.m. frantically typing at the computer while my parents hovered in the room wondering if I’d pull it off.
I did, indeed.
I got rid of all contractions, for one thing, and that upped my word count significantly.
I was in a writing group then. I based my novel somewhat on the people in my writing group, with my novel purporting to be the novel that a previous character I’d created in a story had written since he was a writer in the story, which meant I was doing the writing as a character.
Yes, that’s a confusing mess.
You can understand why I struggled.
There’s a connection in there to why I like “Murder, She Wrote” and the new show “Castle”, which are both of the premise of a mystery writer helping to solve crimes in real life, except the show “Castle” has more updated hair-dos and actually has a book out purported to be written by the fictional character/writer Richard Castle.
Well, anyway, when November was done, our small writing group had four members (out of about seven) who completed NaNoWriMo, which is actually fairly impressive. Lots start. Less finish. That was a really good percentage for our size of a writing group.
“Julie, bring in some of your NaNoWriMo novel to share with the group,” I was asked at the first December meeting. Obviously, I couldn’t do this since I’d somewhat skewered the writing group members in my characterizations of my really bad novel.
“Um, no.”
“Bring something in! They don’t have to be good!”
“Probably not.”
As it is, I don’t even know where that file is located. It’s probably on one of the computers at home, or my mother’s laptop. I have no idea, and can’t even remember what I titled it. I’ve forgotten pretty much everything about the story.
These are all mercies from God.
I had thought about participating this year because I can’t seem to figure out what I am and thought that, at least for a month, I could play “writer” instead of on-off baker/artist/Idunno. But, since I’m going to be somewhat off the grid for about two weeks at the end of November, I decided to fend off the inevitable guilt of setting myself up for a big goal I know I can’t hit this time around.
Still, when November 1st comes knocking, I think of writing about 50,000 words, or thereabouts.
Give it a go. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be 50,000.
