Remember six-word memoirs? Well, I have something that’s the complete opposite of it: NaNoWriMo!
Now, I have no idea how you would pronounce that in its shortened form, but it stands for National Novel Writing Month. The point of it? To write a novel that’s 50 000 words long…in just one month! (Crazy? Maybe. Fun? Definitely!)
Starting on November 1st, writers from all around the world take part in this crazy, frustrating, pain in the rear challenge. (Trust me, I’ve tried it before. It was terrible. Horrendous. Nasty. But a lot of fun! 😀 Unfortunately I never made it to 50k. )
NaNoWriMo is basically a novel-writing program for anyone who has ever thought about writing a novel but never followed through with it. Now, since they’ve limited you to one month, the only thing that matters for this is quantity, NOT quality. This approach allows people to lower their expectations, take risks, write on the fly, and make mistakes. It is about freeing your writing and having fun with writing. Even the people behind NaNoWriMo themselves have acknowledged (on their About page) what your writing will be like for this quantitative challenge:
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap.
So there. 🙂 It’s okay to forget restrictions for this challenge! Just let the words flow. And they better flow, 50k words is equal to about 175 pages.
In 2007, there were over 100 000 participants, and more than 15 000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the end of the month. I’m not certain on their 2008 statistics, but I’m positive they’ve gone up since. How about making 2009 a record breaking year? Click here to sign up and participate in NaNoWriMo!