Alright, so November, aka NaNoWriMo, is finally next week. Halloween first, so that’s something fun to look forward to. Some writers stay up to midnight to start writing immediately, and I’ve done that. (Last year, I felt too old and went to bed early. Both are valid.)
Things to look forward to are vital in life, but more so when tackling something as grueling and intimidating as NaNoWriMo. It’s terrifying your first time, but it can be just as scary a second, third, or tenth time.
But 50k words really isn’t that long. I googled “50k word novels”, and NaNoWriMo has in fact gotten so popular, that the first link is a link to its wiki, and it already has a list of such novels. I’m posting just a few here for reference.
The Great Gatsby, Fight Club, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Giver. (I used to give Animal Farm as an example, but as it turns out, that is less than 30k words. Whoops!) You’ve probably read those books in school. They aren’t long bricks. You could get through them in an afternoon; they’re well-suited to becoming a good-length movie.
Alright, so you could do that length. (You can!) But this is still just an exercise in writing, it’s not real—WRONG. I’m not even going to keep typing that sentence. First: all writing is real writing, is real practice.
Second: plenty of NaNo-written books have gone on to become hits. The most famous is probably Water For Elephants, since it also got a big movie. But The Night Circus, Fangirl, and the entire trilogy of Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress. Yes, for the record, that’s right—three novels in one NaNoWriMo. 150k. It boggles the mind, but hey, stranger things have happened.
All of those books had the same start we’re facing November 1st: 0 words written, 50,000 to go, 30 days to go.
You can do this. I can do this. We’re all going to do this. There’s no cost to participate, no hidden fees anywhere, nothing hurt but your pride if you lose. And even then, there’s a certain dignity to it. You still wrote X amount of words in a month. It’s probably more than you would’ve otherwise written. It’s more than most people write in a month, that’s for sure.
Grit those teeth and get ready to dive in.
