| November is for Novels | | Date Created: Oct 30, 2005, 10:06 AM |
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We're coming up to another November and you know what that means: NaNoWriMo -- National Novel-Writing Month. If you sign up, the goal is to write 50,000 words during the month. It's a wonderfully light-hearted contest that aims just to get you writing and give you confidence. You know you're going to write total and utter rubbish and that's faced squarely. I've known about it for 3 or 4 years, but never really had the time or energy to spare.
This year, I'm really tempted again, although I'm still up to my ears in other stuff. But I've made some real progress with my post-grads and a couple of other projects are winding down.... And I'm going nuts from not writing I'm pretty sure I won't be able to keep up anything like the pace (c. 2000 words a day?! I have trouble committing myself to 100 a day!). But trying and failing seems oddly like something worth doing -- just to gain an appreciation of the scale and so on. I so much want to be able to write fiction. Why? Two words: CS Lewis. (Well, it's two words on the word count.)
The only thing that I've ever done like this previously is "100 words". You commit yourself to writing 100 words (no more, no fewer) every day for a month. Back in March 2003, I used this system as a beginning for grappling with some of the material in the book that became Mealtime Habits -- a set of 100-word studies on Jesus' spirituality. |
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