It’s just April, but you should all ready be preparing for National Novel Writing Month in November. The rules of the competition are that you must write at least 50,000 words from November 1 to November 30. You cannot begin writing prose until November 1, but you can start outlining and plotting and doing character development now and continue prep work until you began writing the actual story on November 1. You can join the National Novel Writing Month community today and start getting into the grove. You can also listen to an NPR interview with Chris Baty, the founder of the National Novel Writing Month by clicking here: The Simple Art of Writing Novels
Do you need a special month or event to write? It would take a nuclear strike to make me STOP writing. Writers with drive and talent and perseverance write DAILY, improving their craft with each sentence. NaNoWriMo is like amateur night at the Dixie Bar and Grill. The domain of wannabes who don’t understand that REAL writers live and die by the printed word and find such events silly in the extreme…
Nothing wrong with Silly. Besides you never know who’s going to step up to the mic at the Dixie Bar and Grill.
A fewof the REAL writers with drive and talent and perseverance, who write daily, improving their craft with each sentence, who live and die (literally) by the printed word, and who have contributed to National Novel Writing Month through pep talks encouraging the wannabes to keep writing:
Katherine Paterson
Neil Gaiman
Philip Pullman
Jonathan Stroud
Meg Cabot
Garth Nix
Juliana Baggott
Sue Grafton
Naomi Novik
Tom Robbins
Sara Gruen
Deanna Raybourn
And, of course, Chris Baty
None of them really seemed to find the event pointless, or take themselves seriously enough to disdain it. The whole point of NaNoWriMo is to get more people to write daily. And yes, such little exercises often end up being silly in the extreme. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t happen.