I am trying to prepare for my 9th NaNoWriMo. What is NaNoWriMo, or Nano, you may ask?
Nano is a writing phenomenon during the month of November. The goal? To write 50,000 words in the month of November. Usually, these are words of fiction, but people do write other things (ex. Screenplays).
The idea behind this is to start a draft of a novel. 50k isn’t generally long enough to get published. But 50k is a start.
I learned about this when I was twelve years old. I participated for the first time when I was 13. I wrote 23,000 that year.
I have “won” twice, once as a sophomore in high school, and once as a senior in high school. But why would someone really do something like this?
If you write every day of November, you only need to write 1667 words a day. Nano builds a community of writers who are all going through the same things. The forums on the website can be helpful with community building as well as the numerous chatrooms.
You gain words as well as a winner’s certificate if you win. Just participating shows yourself that you have discipline. Some days are worse than others when it comes to writing. By attempting Nano, you learn that there are no boundaries to what you can do. It takes determination and perseverance. You have to be able to understand your schedule enough to know when you can fit writing in. You also gain an understanding of your attention span. I write best in small time increments. Ten minutes for me is good. I take about five minutes to do other things, and then I return to my novel.
A winner’s certificate
Happy Writing! If you are interested, this page will help you to get started!