November is National Novel Writing Month! To celebrate and encourage you to join me in the race to 50,000 words, the DreamAnvil will be posting on Sunday for the next four weeks! Get out there and write those novels!
This is it! The moment we have been waiting for, the month I have been preparing you all for. Today a million story ideas will be cast upon the page in a mad dash to the finish line! Many will fail but those who have prepared can find success! Remember when we talked about how to plan and set goals? When we discussed how to fail and how to dream bigger? This is why. NaNoWriMo is the distillation of a writer’s will. The crucible of her ideas. It is a time that squeezes us to produce diamonds. This is November, this is Novel Writing Month! That journey starts today!
NaNoWriMo is an exciting time for me. It is a season that stretches me as a writer and pulls out the best of whatever lurks in my imagination. For the uninitiated NaNoWriMo is a challenge, a gauntlet, a dare. Do you have a novel to write? Prove it. You have one month, just thirty days, to write as much of your novel as is humanly possible. The finish line? Just 50,000 words away!
Wait! Before you leave, let me just say that yes, 50,000 words seems like a lot! It IS a lot of words! Once, I was in your shoes, wondering if Wrimo was even possible. I had a grand story idea, but my previous manuscripts had taken me ages to write! To write something in a month seemed impossible at first. In 2012 I decided to go for it. It didn’t cost me anything. I had a good idea for a book I wanted to write. It seemed like a good idea. So, I signed up. Went online and joined my region and had a good time cracking open my brain and cranking out a banger of a story. I crossed the finish line that year, and held in my hands a fresh story, a small sliver of myself, in my own hands. It felt like I had climbed a mountain and I have been a fan ever since. This year will be my sixth official attempt at the WriMo challenge since that first step in 2012, but I have never stopped not really. Every November my fingers flex and my imagination sparks whether I have a story to write or not. Sometimes I delve into an old story to clean it up. Sometimes I just write small stories for the joy of it.
Like I stated before, this distills everything we have been talking about on the blog from the past year. You will need to flex your goal planning and imagination to get through this. You will need to shake off the fear of failure as you stare down that finish line. You will need to dive deep into what inspires you to keep that motivation going. You will need to be diligent and tough as you hone your craft in real-time. The things I talk about on this blog come from my experiences both winning and failing at WriMo (and at life too). There is no sure-fire way to complete a book. You have to want to write it. You have to want to tell it. I like WriMo because it gives us all, new writers and old, an excuse to write with total abandon. One month. Thirty days. I can’t guarantee that you will complete your book, or even cross the finish line at 50,000 words. You can give it a try though. If you want to finally stop talking about your story and just write it, I encourage you to give WriMo a try. You have so much to gain and nothing to lose.