- National Novel Writing Month: It’s ridiculous, but I don’t care.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do this, but I needed something to distract me from writing essays and reports. Some of you may have heard of something called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Every November since 1999 the organisers have invited anyone and everyone to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I first heard about it last year but declined to take part because I had no story ideas or characters.
But this year was different. I have more than enough stuff outlined to at least give it a bash. So that’s what I’m doing. I didn’t reveal this right away incase, a couple of days in, I realised it wasn’t going to happen and I wouldn’t stick with it. I still felt the same yesterday. But here I am, on day 5, and I am just under a fifth of the way there already.
There are plenty of reasons not to do it – there is no real prize but personal satisfaction, it’s distracting me from university, and at the end of November all I’ll have is 50,000 (hopefully) words of utter crap. Quality, however, isn’t the aim of the game. It’s like scribbling out a terrible first draft of something which could be useful in future, in some form or another. It would take a long, long time to turn it into something worth showing people, but it’s something. The website is great for linking you up with people in your area who are doing the same thing. You can choose to go to arranged meet-ups, or write-ins as they’re called. To be honest I probably won’t do that. That’s just more distraction, isn’t it?
The main reason I’m doing this is that it’s amazing practice for writing in general, and under extreme deadlines. In the past I’ve been very picky and fussy over my writing – I have to go edit as I go along and changes things here and there. You’ve little time to do that here. Just get your head down and write, write, write. It averages out to 1667 words a day, but I’m aiming for 2000 a day because, let’s face it, I won’t be able to do this every day of the month. I have a girlfriend, uni assignments, work, and spontaneous nights out to contend with.
So there we go. It’s about time I challenge myself to do something like this, even if it is a little weird and, frankly, stupid. If you want to be able to write lots, there’s nothing wrong with just sitting down and churning out 50,000 words. Even if they make no sense to anybody but me. 
