NaNoWriMo and me fingers are blistered from rattling out words already. NaNoWriMo for those of you not in the know is National Novel Writing Month. A couple of students in the States (where else!) started it some years back and you sign up for it and attempt to churn out the bones of a book in a month. So there’ll be no blogging, surfing or Facebooking from me for a while.
November is a great month for it. The clocks have changed, the dark and dismal evenings are in and if you have access to a computer and can carve out a few hours for yourself most days the target of fifty odd thousand words in the month is attainable. Of course a lot of what you write is tripe ( or mine is) and will never last edits. But it is a great way of kickstarting that novel you knew you always had in you.
The bulk of the first draft of my first novel was written during NaNoWriMo 2007, I didn’t sign up last year as I was committed to ghostwriting a book and although I started in 2008 I fell off at the first hurdle!
The commitment to put your behind on a chair and write for a few hours does pay off. I felt a great sense of achievement that first year and went on to finish the novel and polish it up and send it off. It died there but I did it, I wrote a book. Maybe this year’s attempt will pay off. I think this novel may be better as I have two under my belt at this stage and understand narrative flow a little better. I’ll be churning it out anyway and it may join other stuff under the bed or it may not.
If you never write it it’ll never be published so it’s worth a try.
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