And so… it begins.
This is the most common response I get when I tell someone about how I spend November each year. At least, how I’ve spent the last two Novembers. Maybe you’ll already know what I’m talking about. Maybe you don’t.
November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo): a month of literary abandon, in which ordinary people achieve extraordinary literary feats and have fun doing it. The goal? 50,000 words by midnight on the 30th November. It’s a huge number, especially when faced with the usual day-to-day problems of work, school, family and friends, but that’s the point - you don’t think you’ll make it, but you do it anyway.
Maybe it won’t be the best quality writing ever - in fact, a lot of the time you’ll probably be spewing utter nonsense in order to get the wordcount by any means possible. But the idea here is to have fun, to indulge your inner story-teller, to just get that story down on paper. Maybe what you’ll be left with needs huge amounts of editing and beating into shape; maybe you’ll never even get to that part. But it doesn’t matter. One day you’ll find what you ended up with, and you’ll read it, and you’ll laugh. It’ll be fun.
On the other hand, perhaps you’ll start something. You might not even be a writer; maybe you’ve been told that you’re no good at English, or your spelling’s not up to scratch, or… any range of possibilities. But they do say that there’s a story in everyone, and who better than you to tell it?
So, maybe I am crazy. The first year I took part in NaNoWrimo I didn’t reach the word goal. I didn’t really mind - I’d had fun writing the story, and it was interesting to see how how I could write once I got down to it. Last year, I cracked it, although that particular novel still sits unfinished among the rest of my documents, waiting for me to get back to business. This year, maybe I’ll lose. I’m trying a different genre than I’m used to - fantasy in a modern setting, rather than my medieval-type fantasy world - which, up till now, hasn’t really worked for me. NaNo struck me as a good time to have another shot at it. Maybe I’ll find that time constraints are even tighter than before, having just started Year 12 and with a heavier workload than previous years. But, whatever happens, I’m going to have fun writing a new story, with new characters, in a setting I haven’t really tried before. And each day I’ll post what I write in this blog, so anyone who’s interested can read along.
http://www.nanowrimo.org/
Link to the NaNoWriMo website - in case you feel the sudden urge to join up. If you do - I salute you!
