November is NaNoWriMo

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 22

There are quite possibly more people writing novels during the month of November than any other time of year, thanks to the popularity of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

In order to ‘win’ NaNoWriMo, participants write a complete novel—defined as 50,000 words—during the month. Here’s a quote from the website: “Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

That kind of free-writing mentality can be useful for cranking out a first draft. Some writers can’t turn off the editors' voices in their heads and end up with writers' block, terrified of making a misstep.

Here’s a writing exercise that quickly illustrates how this approach works. (I didn’t make it up, but alas, I can’t remember where it came from.) Go to a good people-watching spot. First, watch one couple or one small group of people interact. Jot down every single gesture you observe. Do this for 10 minutes.

Next, choose another set of people to watch, but this time, write down only the gestures that you find intriguing. Take 10 minutes again.

You’ll probably find that you wrote a lot more during the first ten minutes than the second. That’s because your inner editor was temporarily silenced. Once you started judging whether your subject matter was good enough to warrant writing about, that slowed you down and decreased your output. More thoughts on this next time...

And hey, if you’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year, remember you have till March 1 to polish up your first chapter and submit it to the InnermoonLit contest.