NaNoWriMo – What is in it for me?

If you have been watching a twitter or facebook stream in the last couple of days, you will have seen much about a thing called nanowrimo. 

Today is day 2 of nanowrimo.  For my sins, I have decided to take part in this years event.  It is run in November and is based around National Novel Writing Month.    http://nanowrimo.org/

Running from the 1st to the 30th of the month, it says on it’s website that it is “thirty days and nights of literary abandon.”  

I have scoured and searched the website and the informaton gained on it.  The thing that does stand out for me is that around the country they are having #nanowrimo meet ups for support and assistance.  There are also forums on the website to help when we hit the dreaded “writers block,” which we all do.

From what I have seen, there seem to be several types of people who are taking part.

• Those who take it deadly serious and using it as a publicity awareness exercise.
• Those like me, taking an idea as far as they can to see if it can be turned into anything worthy of a publishing house.
• People who fancy the idea of writing a novel, but have never put pen to paper before, and just fancy giving it a go.
• Those who cheat.

There are probably other groups of people out there, but a lot of the entrants I have come across seem to fall into one of those categories.

What do writers get for taking part in the exercise?

The answer to that lies in the heart of every entrant who is striving to reach their 50,000 words in the month of November – as that is literally the simply target. 

30 days and nights to write 50,000 words of a novel, using your own imagination, experiences and abilities.  Each novel will be different from the next and the amount of words that will be written over the next month in this competition will be staggering.  At the end of the month, those who reach the 50,000 wordcount will “win”.   The prize will be the knowledge that you have written 50,000 words of a novel, and then it is up to you to continue to write, or to begin editing and working on the piece of work you have created.   Winners are also allowed to use a special web badge which shows that they are a nanowrimo winner.

The idea is not to edit, rewrite, or correct grammar in what you are writing.  It is a simple exercise similar to a brain dump of your novel in progress.  How you get to the end point is up to you, and how much time you wish to spend on it.   With a daily goal of approximately 1700 a day to write, it is process that needs a little commitment to get to the end. 

My evening mealtime wordcount is sitting at 4614.  I need to get ahead for a couple of days toward the end of the month that I will not be able to write. 

Why am I doing this?  I don’t really know.  I have had ideas running through my head since I was 15 and up until now I have limited my writing to the more corporate requirements of business in operation.    I am now away from that environment, and with the freedom to express myself in my own words, the urge to write for leisure has begun to bite.

I am away from the more general aspects of grammatical perfecton.  They tell us that it is like riding a bike and is something that you never forget, well believe me, it is not.  I am waiting on a grammar book to arrive for when I decide to take any of my ramblings to the next level.  For now, I am enjoying the baby steps in commiting myself to 50,000 words in 30 days. 

Will I make it – well, only time will tell.  What I will do, is update my daily word count in the sidebar in my blog to remind myself how far I need to go. 

I hope some of you will be joining in this journey.  It is a personal journey, but one which we can share with ease, especially in the blogging world, where we are almost all aspiring novellists, just looking for a way to translate our energies into our work.

I wish everyone taking part the very best of luck with writing and forming their ideas.  We rock.