NaNo is Coming! NaNo is Coming!

NaNo is coming and I have felt like a kid in a massive candy store this week. I have four different ideas in the works and am adding to the ever growing pile daily… or nightly as the case often seems to be. I wake up in the middle of the night and must fish for a pen and paper to jot the idea that jolted me from sleep. It's great.

And I really love the idea I'm going to use for this NaNo challenge. It might turn out horribly… but who cares? It’s NaNo!

(For those of you not familiar with NaNo; it is the National Novel Writers Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. On November 1st of every year, writers from across the country start writing. The goal is for each participant to make it to 50,000 words in 30 days. It doesn't matter what type of novel you work on, all that matters is that you work on it.)

I don't know what it is about NaNo, but it gets my motor running. I suppose it's the thrill of a challenge, the exhilaration of that looming deadline, the motivation of the bright red letters that keep track of my word count to date. Or maybe it's the necessity of lowering expectations and writing like you are possessed. Sometimes, the best motivator is challenging yourself to take risks for the sake of taking risks.

That's what NaNo is about to me. Taking risks simply because I can. I don't have to painstakingly craft every page as I tend to do otherwise. When I go into NaNo mode, I just write what comes. Sometimes it's crap. Other times it isn't. And even when it is crap, it keeps me writing, thinking, challenging myself to not give up.

I stay so busy with life that writing every day, while I still do it, isn't always easy. Some days putting the novel aside and saying it's too hard seems like a brilliant idea. But I know with absolutely certainty that should I take that quitter approach, I will never finish. So, I NaNo the hell out of writing once a year and come out the other side recharged, refreshed and ready to attack.

For me, it works. I'm excited to go it again. And I hope to see some of you there, challenging yourselves to lower your expectations and just write what comes without over analyzing whether it's good enough, real enough, right enough. It’s making it to the finish line that counts this time.

Are you game?

http://www.nanowrimo.org
(Site is slow, there were 79,000 participants last year and likely to be quite a few more this year... makes for slow loading!)

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