Saturday 5 November 2011

NaNoWriMo!

So now I've taken on another challenge. What is it about me and challenges? NaNoWriMo; write a novel in a month. Yeah right. A. I don't have the time, and B. I probably don't have the skill. Well I don't know about the latter, I'll never know if I don't have a go. The feedback I've had from the Arvon courses I've been on are that I do have writing ability and that I learn quickly. What I probably lack is application. And that's largely because I get distracted by all the other things I've got on. But I say quite often to staff and students "You find time to do the things that are important to you". So if my writing is important to me I need to find time to do. NaNoWriMo feels manageable. Writing 50,000 words is imaginable. I wrote 80,000 for my thesis, many more if you include the pre-edited versions. So 50,000 is not impossible. And the brilliant thing about NaNoWriMo is that you go for quantity not quality. Yes that's right, quantity not quality. It's all about writing with self-edit turned off. It doesn't matter what you are writing, what matter is that you are writing. It's day 5 and I'm a bit behind with my daily allocation - the 50,000 words works out to 1667 words a day, every day, for the whole of November. I've still got 537 words to do today to get back on target but that feels doable. Especially as it's only 6.30 in the morning and it's a Saturday. I'm sure I can bang out another few hundred words today, even get ahead of myself again and bank a few more hundred against days when I am struggling. After all I am writing this aren't I? I clearly haven't run out of words yet. NaNoWriMo is getting me out of bed early in the morning. I feel the urge to get up and get cracking. I need to get at least a chunk of my word count under my belt by the time I set off for work and then with this notebook I can carry on typing on the train which is brilliant. And it is so liberating just typing without going back to check anything. Just type, and type and type. So here's to NaNoWriMo and the long days ahead. Roll on end of November and those 50,000 words.