NaNoWriMo Fun

I have some exciting news to share! I've just officially signed up to be a part of NaNoWriMo! Or in layman's terms, National Novel Writing Month!

Basically, during the month of November, I will be writing a 50,000 word, most likely crappy, novel. I won't be alone, since last year there were around 200,000 participants. Of course, not everyone actually made it to the 50,000 word mark, but 30,000 of them did. So I have a good chance.

The premise of NaNoWriMo is that most people are crippled by perfectionism. When they're writing, they feel like the dialogue is cheesy and the plot is unbelievable. So they work on little sections of their writing to try to make it perfect, but they never actually get anything done. They get through fifty pages and stop.

The cure for that is writing a massive amount in a short period of time. You'll have no time to be a perfectionist. Of course, you're not going to have a wonderful, publishable novel by churning it out in one month, but at least you'll have something to work with. You can later go back and edit and cut and fix to your heart's content. Or you can trash it. Or you can move to France, hang out in cafes and say you're a novelist. Either way, I think it'll be fun.

And through this blog I've already followed some of their advice: tell everyone about it. As they wrote, "the only thing keeping you from quitting is the fear of looking pathetic in front of all the people who've had to hear about your novel for the past month. The looming specter of personal humiliation is a very reliable muse."

I think I like these people.

Anyone want to join me? Like they say on the NaNoWriMo website, "let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together."

http://www.nanowrimo.org/