"NaNoWriMo is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."
I'm not doing this because I've already got this book on the go, but it sounds a real challange, and maybe quite a lot of fun too.
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6 comments:
I can't do it because I've already started writing so it doesn't qualify :-)
Maybe in about 4 years time when I've finished this one!
Hmmm....it's an idea, but I think I'd be concerned that I'd get that story in my head instead of TWH. I might lose the thread of inspiration I've got for this one.
I've got a programme I downloaded that might be good to play about with. They're small-scale projects. I'm going to write an entry about it, maybe tomorrow.
Count me in this year. I need a good swift kick in the arse to get my story started and finished. I have been stuck on chapter one for a year now. Doh!
I'm probably a bit like that for the Prologue, as well as the rest of the book. You know the kind of thing, it's been in my head for months but I need to start getting more of it down on paper.
Maybe I could use it as a tool to write loads of this book, but make sure I don't hit the 50,000 words because it wouldn't be right to claim the certificate you get at the end if you succeed.
It's a shame really that I started writing properly a couple of months ago, or I could have done it for this :-)
Someone emailed me this but I'd forgotten about it. I don't think you actually enter anything right? (write? hehe) You could do TWH. I think I might do it. Maybe, as Don suggested, I could start from scratch. Let me know if you change your mind, and thanks for posting this!!!
I have signed up to the site to have a look at it. Apparently you enter your story just from a word-count point of view, they don't read them. If you succeed you get a certificate.
They've got a forum which looks like it could be very good for help and advice from other people taking part.
I might have a go at writing 50,000 words in November, but not the 'writing a novel from scratch'. The rules are pretty definate about not using anything you've already started writing (although notes and ideas are okay).
Maybe next year...
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