How many words can you write in a month?
Tap, tap, tap… listen closely and you’ll hear the music of a typewriter keyboard in homes, offices, and coffee shops all around the region. Every year on the first of November, thousands of people put pen to paper or peck on their keyboards with the goal of writing 50,000 words in the next thirty days. They’re taking part in the National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO), a collective story-making marathon that started in 1999. Other than writing 50,000 words in the month of November, this challenge has very few rules.
If you’re interested in making a lot of progress on your novel idea, sign up and get writing! The NANOWRIMO organization is nonprofit and participation costs nothing (but expect to spend a lot of time and creativity).
Ideally, a NANOWRIMO project is a brand-new novel, but no one will blink an eye if you’re revising or journaling, or working on several small projects at once. Veterans encourage newbies to have a pretty solid outline prepared, but if you want to write off the cuff, go for it!
Conventional wisdom says a 50,000-word novel is about the length of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. If you write every day, that adds up to a cadence of 1,667 words every 24 hours.
What’s your NANOWRIMO story?
If you’ve participated in NANOWRIMO in the past, or you’re just starting this month, we want to hear from you! Let us know your struggles, triumphs, miracles and surprises. Just enter your experiences in the comments below.
I participated in NaNoWriMo in 2010 and it was exciting, horrible, frustrating, and exhilarating – pretty much simultaneously. I strongly encourage all who do it to post their progress online and share with others. It just makes it more fun. The best advice I got was to “write without even looking at your screen, and don’t edit until you’ve made your word goal.” It’s all about the numbers!
I made the goal and from that mess I found about a paragraph that turned into my graphic novel 4-book series, Dead Max Comix, which launches in January!