NaNoWriMo and Typed Wordiness

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November has Arrived. With November so does NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is the US National Novel Writing Month. This is the month where people spend every day writing 1,667 words per day, so that by the end of the month they have a draft of a novel. I have tried the challenge several times and completed it just once.

The challenge is to write, and ignore the inner censor. It’s the idea of thinking "This is crap" and "this is rubbish" and continuing to write anyway. The goal of NaNoWriMo is not to come out with a polished turd. It’s to get into the habit of writing, and ignoring the reflex of stopping. It’s about allowing ideas, and concepts, and more to flow, and to get to 50,000 words.

It’s also about not panicking. It’s easy to panic during this challenge. If you fall behind on the first day you have several hundred words to write. If you fall behind several days in a row you end up with several thousand words to write and catch up. It’s easy to think "I will never reach the word count goal, and give up. That’s why I gave up, more than once.

The other thought we have is "But I will never re-read what I wrote and I will never edit it, so this is a waste of time. I should do something else instead.

I prefer another challenge. Writing a three hundred word blog post every single day. It’s a less popular challenge but I think it’s a better investment of my time, and skills. It’s also a challenge that goes on three hundred and sixty five days a year. I think I need to invest time in learning how to develop characters and plot, before I attempt NaNoWriMo again. In theory when I finish writing this I could toy with that. We’ll see.