Nanowrimo is coming up! Here’s why you should take part this year.
Writing a novel in a month is, surprisingly, good for mental health!
Last November, I wrote a novel in just a month! As Nanowrimo season approaches again, I wanted to share my thoughts from last year, in the hopes of inspiring you, whether you are a writer or a reader, to participate.
I’m not entirely sure what I wrote counts as a novel. It is as unstructured and confusing and Joyce’s Ulysses, but a good deal less genius. Still, I wrote over 200 Pages, and they carry within them the ideas, characters, storylines and structure of what will one day be my first ever work of fiction.
For those that don’t know about it, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a writing challenge consisting in writing a full novel in a month. And it is tough. Harder than I thought it would be. “1667 words a day, that’s no biggie,” I thought, naively to myself, 50 000 words ago. Turns out that churning out those words, when they have to make sense, when they have to go in some sort of unified direction, is a good deal more difficult even than creating a 1667 word blog piece per day. You have to take your characters where they need to go — and sometimes the unruly creatures decide to do things of their own. Today, my character had sex in a casino…
