NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH

Wow, I haven't posted anything here since August. Needless to say I had a busy summer, and an equally busy fall, but now that the winter is coming on strong and it gets dark early here in the Northeast I hope to have time to regularly post again.

I am writing quite a bit these days as I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month.  Have you heard of it? Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Of course my computer went on the fritz, because I've spent time doing laundry, dishes, oh yes, and my regular nine-to-five job, I'm just a tad behind on my expected word count, but that is part of the value of this exercise - to learn to shut everything else out for a certain period of time during the day and just write ! As they tell you on their website - Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Oh yes, I have one other problem - I am battling writing forward instead of going back to edit, but I will prevail. Make no mistake, when you wrie this way you write a lot of crap, but you can take that out later and hopefully you will have a nugget of something meaningful to your story that can be tweaked and prodded and coaxed into something worthy - but not now!



The Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric
Trinity College, Hartford, CT



I did attend one write-in at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, just yesterday. It was a beautiful Sunday, warm for the season, and it was inspiring to be out of my home and all the distractions it contains, and into a room with like-minded individuals intent on writing. I'm not quite where I want ot be yet, but I wrote for three hours, it was inspiring.

Honestly, I could end up with 50,000 and a hellacious story, but at least it will be my hellacious story and I can claim my mission accomplished.