NaNoWriMo- Here we go Again

I'm going to regret this.

November, the eleventh month of the year, commonly associated with Movember, is when the world of writing sees a drastic change. The landscape is quiet, weirdly quiet, it's as if just about every writer has disappeared. Where have they gone? Well if you were to listen in you may hear the occasional sob, or if you’re lucky enough you will catch a procrastinator cleaning their whole house. Its National Novel Writing Month.

For anyone who doesn’t know, National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) is an annual writing challenge, the goal of which is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Who would be so insane as to attempt this? Writers.

Now this year is not going to be my first Nanowrimo rodeo, in fact I did it last year, only to crash and burn due to my own procrastination. But since then I have been preparing, analysing, thinking about what I could do better. Here’s the plan.

Two thousand words a day is the approach which most people go for, and while it is a lot of words to write per day, I know I can do it, since the maximum I have managed to write in a day is five thousand. I used this strategy last year, but in a wrong way. This year I will just write, without looking back on what I have written. Grammar mistakes will be welcome with open arms, sentence structure is unimportant, I do not care how stupid it sounds. The goal is the word count, so that's what I am going to focus on.

As the NYT bestselling writer Austin Kleon says, “It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now, it just needs to exist.”. I am still on my first draft, and the best bit of advice I have received is to make my first draft bad on purpose. Crazy right? But it makes editing so much easier. After all it's better to see visible improvement when you’re improving something terrible. And imagine how motivational that must be.

Another odd strategy I intend to use is typing in Comic Sans. Hear me out. I hate Comic Sans as much as anyone else, but a few months ago I saw this insane idea haunting my social media, apparently Comic Sans would make me more productive. I decided to try it purely because of how ridiculous it was, with very low hopes… and that is when I wrote the most words I had ever written in a single sitting- those five thousand words I mentioned earlier seemed to make fun of me with their Comic Sans laugh.

Despite all of this planning and preparation my hopes are pretty low from last year. I will try to make updates every two weeks but If I go radio silent for the rest of November I am either doing really well or more likely I have failed terribly and am afraid to show my face. For now, I will go and make sure I am prepared.