On Tuesday, November 1, a pair hundred thousand individuals around the globe will take part in Nationwide Novel Writing Month, which, regardless of its intuitive title, I’ll clarify right here: The aim is to jot down a 50,000-word novel (that’s about 175 manuscript pages, primarily based on a depend of roughly 300 phrases per web page) in thirty days.
That’s about 1,700 phrases, or six double-spaced manuscript pages, give or take, a day — assuming that you simply write daily.
Insane? Extra like insanely ingenious. The thought behind this seemingly insurmountable aim is to jot down for amount, not for high quality — to sprint off a primary draft underneath the auspices of a worldwide undertaking to distance your self from the little voice in your head that tells you that you must return and polish that passage, pare that paragraph, or prune that web page.
It’s mainly hours and hours of feverish, fervent, frantic freewriting — a method for unleashing your creativity by abandoning any pretext of inserting your editorial alter ego into the method. Write, write some extra, and simply carry on writing, with out trying again.
The sponsors of NaNoWriMo, because it’s abbreviated, acknowledge which will appear to be a dangerous endeavor. Chances are you’ll limp to a end at midnight on November 30, solely to find that you’ve devoted a lot of your valuable time to churning out — what? What did you accomplish? The product of some hundred thousand keystrokes. Is it prepared for publication? Hardly.
However no novel, no quick story, no poem, no article or evaluation or essay or different composition, is print-ready. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is that you’ll have overcome your trepidation at devoting a lot effort and time towards crafting a towering achievement in prose, utilizing the novelty of the undertaking as an excuse. After which you’ll have a primary draft of a novel (after which the actual work begins).
Final yr, solely somewhat greater than 10 % of individuals reached their aim of manufacturing the primary draft of a 50,000-word novel. However almost 200,000 others staggered away from their computer systems on the final day of November with at the very least the beginning of one thing satisfying.
Enroll on the NaNoWriMo Site, and discover the location’s options that will help you inspire your self. Certainly one of these is a software that allows you to replace your phrase depend day by day. You can even submit excerpts of your work in progress for others to learn.
