Who's-a-what-now?
It stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea being that a lot of people want to write a novel but are so daunted by the task that they never get to far. Instead of viewing novel writing a write, edit, throw out, rewrite, cry, write some more, process, you just take one month to try to write 50,000 words. It doesn't matter if 3/4 of those words are "poopy" copy and pasted over and over again on your screen, at least you wrote something. By limiting time and setting a goal of word count, writers are encouraged to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and simply get words out there. Editing can come later, plot can emerge on its own. I think the biggest accomplishment is in showing people that it can be done, that writing lengthy works isn't an insurmountable block.
Personally? I'm not doing it. While I love novels; series of novels; shows with multi-episode, multi-season story arches; and movie series, I don't consider myself to write in that fashion. I enjoy writing in 1-5 page spans. I've been corralled into writing longer pieces pretty much only in an academic setting. I got though two such papers based on my own research, and I could see myself writing a book along those lines, but like many academically inclined books, the chapters would be independently sustainable with only common themes emerging between them.
Maybe when I'm older I'll be more interested in writing a novel. However, I like the idea of doing something creative with my month. I'm going to make more of an effort to blog, paint, craft, and read this month. We're still a ways off from New Years, and Lent was a long time ago. Some consider this to be the Holiday Season, but I think we can leave December as a time for family and charity and make November a time for creativity.
Good luck to you NaNoWriMo-ers! I look forward to reading your future novels. Be creative, have fun, and prove to yourself that you can do it! Happy November 1st to all!
No comments:
Post a Comment