NaNoWriMo and Blogging

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November is the month when a group of people try to write 1667 words per day for a month. they have write-in events, word sprints and many other gimmicks to encourage them to break the challenge into less daunting challenges. I didn’t even consider participating this year for a simple reason. This is my 360th day in a row of writing a daily blog post.

The Daily Blog Challenge

My challenge was less ambitious. My goal was to write at least three hundred words per day, every day, without taking days off. I didn’t allow myself to count a photo as a blog post because that would be too easy. I wanted to give myself a productive challenge.

I chose to write a blog post every single day for two reasons. The first is that I grew tired of seeing ads and posts I didn’t care about on Facebook. I grew tired that the time that Facebook was wasting was benefiting them, without benefiting them. By writing a blog post daily I would “waste” an hour or two every single day. Eventually though, that waste of time would benefit me. The first benefit is that every single day for 360 days I have had to stop, think, and write.

Some days I would sit in front of the computer looking for inspiration for an hour or two and find none. This didn’t matter. I always think of something to write. Every day i have a blog post to show for that two or three hours of focus.

NaNoWriMo is 1667 Words Per Day For A month

If you try the NaNoWriMo challenge you have to write 1667 words per day, and you need to try to create a novel, if possible. It is the National Novel Writing Month after all. I like the idea of writing every day, but I hate the idea of writing fiction at the rate of 1667 words per day. It’s my inner censor, that I am not good at controlling. My inner censor, when it comes to fiction writing tells me that it’s crap, and that I should stop wasting my time.

Achieved Once

Quite a few years ago I achieved NaNoWriMo. I reached the daily word count. I enjoyed the writing process but I never had the strength of character to re-read and edit what I wrote, so it lay dormant. Every subsequent time I tried to write a NaNoWriMo challenge my inner censor got me to give up. I don’t have the confidence to participate and achieve this challenge.

If I want to catch up with the NaNoWriMo challenge I would need to write a further 10,000 words today, and that is what I don’t like about the challenge. When you’re working towards such a high word count you waste words and effort. You write, in three hundred words, what you could write in ten.

Imagine going from micro blogging to NaNoWriMo. The contrast is huge.

Fighting the Inner Censor

When you write 1667 words per day you don’t need every word to be kept. The aim is to be verbose so that a week or two down the line you have something to edit, re-write, and re-work. The aim is to let go of the thought that you’re writing crap, and to get ideas on paper. The aim is to spend the next eleven months re-editing everything that you have written, into something that is more interesting, and more worthwhile.

According to WordPress.com I have written 322 posts this year, containing 167,000 words. I achieved this by writing at least three hundred words per day, every single day of this year so far. I like having this daily goal, and habit, and the beauty of this is that it’s a year long project, rather than a one month goal. The habit is part of my daily routine, for several seasons now.

The community is built around a website but events also take place in the physical world, so if you participate you can meet people in person, and write at the same time as they write. This is a challenge where you can expand your social network. A few years ago I went to events but not recently.

NanoWriMo Discounts

Aside from getting into the writing habit, you also get discounts via the website. This means that if you want to use Novlr, Day One, Freewrite, Scrivener or other options you can get a discount. In some cases you get a free year. In others you get a discount.

Complete Freedom

You don’t need to write a novel. You can write e-mails, blog posts, a work of fiction, poetry or anything. In theory you could count anything you write. Writing is writing. Writing daily is writing daily. Fighting the inner censor that says “stop writing junk” is one of the key challenges writers like me had to overcome.

And Finally

One reason for which bloggers should not participate in NaNoWriMo is that the blog post that could have been done in three hundred years gets prolonged and extended, from that quick to read three minutes, to something that takes four and a half minutes to read.