NaNoWriMo

[docscarabus]

OK,  the idea of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words in 30 days?  My thesis took me a full academic year (9 months).  Admittedly, fiction doesn't require research.   50,000 words is about 200 pages.  I tried to write 5 pages a day,  I consider that full-time writing.   To pull this off, taking weekends off, you'd have to do 9.5 pages a day.

Comments

[rikibeth]

But, for those who've taken the NaNo shilling (this would include my housemate and my kid), they most certainly don't take weekends off!

Housemate works in a customer service call center, so is able to generate wordcount during her workday. Then she transcribes it at home and adds more while she's at it.

Kid, well, her school is a polling place so they had Tuesday off, and she spent it writing; I know she's been spending some evening time on it as well. Possibly study halls. Possibly downtime during theater rehearsals. If she's writing during class, and it's reflected in her grades, I will do something dire, I swear. I just try to remind her about actual homework.

[plutherus]

I would guess that for a thesis, most of the time is spent researching, and a very small percentage is actually spent in writing.

NaNoWriMo is a writing exercise. Nobody who does it is going to have a finished novel at the end of it. Part of it is to build momentum, establish a habit of writing constantly. Part of it is to get past the common block of going over the same part of a story over and over, tweaking it repeatedly and never moving on. By concentrating purely on word count, and deliberately ignoring quality of prose, one can finish an entire story, then work on the prose, change things around, and fix problems while rewriting, starting in December.

Writing's like any other skill, you improve through regular practice. Worse case scenario for anyone finishing NaNoWriMo is that they've completed a 50,000 word writing exercise, even if none of it gets used for anything. Best case, of course, is that you've got a rough draft of a novel done.

[docscarabus]

The problem I have with it is it seems like a crash diet. Regular practice to me is one or two pages a day over a year. Marathon, not a sprint. Regular practice is about creating habits that last over time. The goal seems entirely unreasonable. Isn't it better to have a bunch of small managable goals?

Kudos to you for doing it of course.

[plutherus]

Yeah, good analogy. Not sure a sprint is necessarily a bad thing. Or a crash diet to achieve a specific goal quickly is really so horrible. As long as one follows up by establishing better eating habits.

Whether it's realistic remains to be seen. I haven't actually *done* it yet. It's only on the sixth day, and I'm already way behind, so it may turn out to be unreasonable after all.

Still gonna keep trying for the rest of the month, though. Even if I don't manage to finish, I'll have *something* come December.

[docscarabus]

Does it have to be a novel? Can you 50,000 of journal?