Next month is NaNoWriMo. (That’s National Novel Writing Month for those of you who aren’t novelists.)
The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to provide a forum for accountability and encouragement for would-be novelists to actually crank out their brain child.
The goal of NaNoWriMo is for each registered writer to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s 1,667 words a day. Every day. A standard page in Word, say, is about 300 words, which translates to 5 1/2 pages a day, 170 pages in a month. Clearly, this is a huge undertaking.
And for the first time I will be undertaking it.
Or mostly undertaking it. Even though I’m officially registered and all, I don’t think I’ll make the word count. I have other writing assignments – paying ones (wahoo!) – that I have to work on, and those will take priority. So, my personal goal is closer to 30,000 words, which is still 1000 words a day and still seems daunting.
The nice thing is that no one will ever read these words. They can be pure and total garbage. And I’m pretty sure they will be. But that’s okay. I’m the kind of writer who can take garbage, find the gems in it, and write a shiny new story that’s heaps better than the junk that birthed it. It’s getting the garbage out of my brain and onto the page that’s hard.
Which is where NaNoWriMo comes in. It gets me to put words on the page.
Of course, NaNoWriMo isn’t really about writing a novel (unless you’re some kind of genius). It’s about writing something that can be revised (and revised and revised) into a novel. I’m going to use my friend Helen’s term and call what I write next month my “zero draft.”
And, yes, it will probably be quite that bad.
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Since I’ll be busy cranking out those 1000 words a day for the rest of the month, you are going to get to enjoy six awesome guest bloggers, all of whom are writers of one kind or another. In honor of Thanksgiving and in celebration of books, they’ll each answer this question:
What book (excepting the Bible) are you most grateful for and why?
I can’t wait to hear their responses. I hope you enjoy them, too!