NaNoWriMo Approaches
I’m Just Thinking About It
The National Novel Writing Month is just around the corner in November. That’s NaNoWriMo for short.
You sit down on November 1 and start writing. Fast. You want to get 50,000 words on paper before the month is over. This works out to an average of 1,667 words a day, give or take. It doesn’t cost anything to participate. You’re only competing against yourself. It’s all on the honor system.
On average, only 10% to 15% of these people will finish the event. It started off in 1999 with 21 participants in the San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland areas where I live in California. Now, it is in more than 90 countries. In 2022, 413,295 people, including 85,000 students in the Young Writers Program, participated.
Of the seven NaNoWriMo’s I’ve signed up for I completed three of them. Actually, I think there was one a very long time ago, but the records I have access to are lost in the cob webby depths of various computer meltdowns I’ve had through the years.
There are prizes involved for both participants and people who finish. The prizes for finishers are usually a deeper discount on whatever goodies are offered — things like writing software or planning software. Over the years, I’ve purchased several of them, like Atticus, Scrivener, and Plottr. I just looked, and there are 16 programs listed for November 2023. They might add more as we get closer to November.
First Draft Pro Scrivener Campfire Frewrite Novlr Pro Writing Aid Novel Pad Dabble Butter Docs KDP Storyist Reedsy Learning Ingram Spark 4TheWords Writers Mastery Academy Plottr Sisters In Crime
One piece of software by fellow Medium Writer Andrea Feccomandi is Bibisco. I’ve put a link below to the article he wrote in early October here on Medium about the software and the nice 20% discount he is offering until the middle of November for NaNoWriMo 2023. By the way, he wrote the software. I’m looking forward to using it this year. Normally, it is $47; with the 20% discount, it was $37.50. What a deal!
There have been years when something happened at the beginning of the month, and I was unable to write even one word. Some years, I only got halfway, but the ones where I finished and even wrote more than the required 50,000 or the 30,000 words during the NaNoWriMo camps in April and July just felt really good.
To write a 50,000-word document, you want to write 1,667 words a day. If you’ve got other commitments like family, jobs, school, and life in general, those amounts are going to vary from day to day. I typically pound out 2,000 words a day. At least, I try to. In years past, I’d save up for the weekend to do marathon writing sessions. I taught myself to wake up an hour or more earlier every day to have some quiet writing time before work.
All that has changed for me since I retired and don’t have a job to go to. When I retired, I said I’d be a writer. People ask me, “What do you do with your time?” I say, “I’m a writer.” And then they say, “Yes, but what do you do?” Didn’t hear me the first time?
My NaNoWriMo events have not always been novels. I’ve written a memoir, how-to books, and co-authored channeled books with fictional characters conjured up from my imagination. A little channeling funny. When I wrote that last part, Daniel, my character from the 1880s, and the book with the working title “Daniel’s Story,” said, “I object.” I want to do more of that.
In fact, NaNoWriMo encourages people to do whatever their hearts desire; the work doesn’t have to be a novel. That was the plan when they started in 1999. It has changed since then. At first, they called the folks who wanted to do their own thing NaNo Rebels, and then they relaxed the rules for everybody. The idea is just to get folks out there writing and writing in a big way.
What’s nice is they also allow for planning to happen before November 1st. It didn’t used to be that way, but now they are encouraging it, though I haven’t really started yet.
NaNoWriMo is officially a charitable foundation now. They hired their first staff in 2006, seven years after they started. They support young people and educators all over the world with donations of computers.
You can be part of the group or just tag along and go the distance by yourself, but there is an energy that helps you move forward through whatever it is that you end up deciding to write.
Typically, the writing for everybody during NaNoWriMo is fast. It’s your first draft. If you leave it alone for a couple of months and come back to it at the end of January, you can see if you want to move it forward and eventually publish. Hey, it’s your book.
People have even used the challenges to edit their books, though I’ve never quite figured out how that would work. I read that somebody wants to translate a comic book into another language and was asking in the NaNo forums what everybody thought. One person thought it should not be allowed. Another person said it should be allowed. I know my husband has translated books from German into English and vice versa. It is a very difficult thing to do.
To my way of thinking, 50,000 words are pretty short for a novel. I’m inclined to think of a novel as being at least 120,000 to 180,000 words — more for something that is fantasy. I have always found that whatever I’ve got at 50,000 words always grows to at least twice that size as I begin the re-writing and editing phase.
So, here’s hoping you’ll join us. If you are late for November, join us in April or July.
The Links:
Bibisco — Use NaNoWriMo23 for a 20% discount — a program written by our own Andrea Feccomandi at Medium NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo — Discounted Software and Programs for 2023 NaNoWriMo at Wikipedia