NaNoWriMo

Attention to all writers: Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo? It stands for National Novel Writing Month, which happens to be November! And guess what? it’s close. So for any of you interested in writing a novel, this is a great challenge to try out! Go to www.nanowrimo.org and you can create a profile for free to join in the challenge. Starting on November 1st you start writing on a blank document and you report your word count on the website. By the end of the month your goal is to reach a 50,000 word count. Granted this will be a rough draft, so it doesn’t mean you’ll have something ready to publish, but the first draft really is a big hurdle to get over.

So I would like to challenge all of you to write a novel in the month of November! The best part about it is that you get this month to prepare so you’re all ready to go on November 1st. A great article to read would be this one that talks about getting ready to write your novel.

I realize that there are planners and pantsers out there. Planners being the writers that have to plan our the entire story before they can write the first word, and Pantsers being the ones that want to go by the seat of their pants and just see what appears on the page. There are also those who like being something in between like a planster. But since writing 50,000 words in 30 days is so intensive, I would suggest having a little bit of a plan going into it. So check out this article to help you work out an idea of your story that you’ll be writing.

I know that this challenge can seem really intimidating, especially when you get into it. Trust me, I’m scared to death about it too. But I heard someone say once that we’re actually more afraid of succeeding than we are of failing. That doesn’t seem to make sense, but in reality, even if we don’t make it to 50,000 words, we’ll still probably get farther than we would have otherwise, and that’s a success in and of itself. So be brave enough to succeed with me and jump in and do what you’ve always wanted to do! Write a novel!