November Means Writing a Novel in a Month

 

It is November, so that means it is NanNoWriMo. That means that myself along with thousands and thousands of writers around the world attempt to write 50 000 words in the month of November. It is a challenge that I have taken up since 2015, and I am happy to say that I've won every year since.

Have you always been meaning to write a novel? This is a great month to take it up since there is a whole community to support you and the challenge forces you into a daily writing groove. A groove and habit that you need if you have hope of writing novels or making a living from writing.

You can learn more about it here.

As I said, I have won every hear since 2015. Last year, I hit my personal best by writing 60 000 plus words. Everett and Danika challenged me to aim for 100 000 this year, which is obviously a massive jump from 60k. I am going to give it a shot.

My bigger achievable goal is to earn all the badges that can be obtained on the site for doing various things like making sure you write every day or make sure every day you write at least 1667 words. So far, early into the challenge, I have a good shot at not only earning every badge but potentially even hit 100k, since I'm well ahead where I need to be word wise at this point with well over 7k words (with many more to be written today).

My hope is that NaNoWriMo affects the site in a positive way. My goal is to get the site moving again and having something interesting to read every day. Though I have client work and now this challenge thrown on top, my aim is to balance all that and keep posting stuff on here. 

The positive affect that I want to achieve is on top of movie writing, I want to occasionally detail my progress on my challenge of writing 50k plus words and how the creative process is going as I craft a novel.

So far, I noticed right off the bat that I wrote Epilogue when I meant the first part of the novel to obviously be my prologue. I don't tend to plan much out before I do creative writing. I find that extensive planning hampers me and makes it harder for me to create as I like my characters to lead me along. This also means that there are often paragraphs upon paragraphs that will only ever be for me since that is how I start working out my story and get through all the kinks.

As this novel progresses, I am starting to think that the prologue may have been something that was just for me, since it takes away what could possibly be a mystery for the reader to solve. Even if I keep the prologue, halfway through writing it there was an aspect of the story that I suddenly changed, so I just started to pretend that a character that initially could only be seen by one person now could potentially be seen by everyone but was now just hiding away.

I also have changed several of the character's names about 50 times already. I am notoriously bad at remembering people's names in real life and so, I am even worse when it come to fictional characters of my own creation. I have just run with the name changes for now and after the challenge, I will go back to fix things.

November is all about just writing. Writing even if it is messy and lacks coherence and is horrible. The editing and cleaning is for future months, and I can curse November version of me during the editing months. For now, I have goals and achievement and badges to earn.

It may be a few days in already., but I really encourage you to try the challenge if you've ever thought about writing a novel. I'll try to throw in a few updates on my creative process and any obstacles that I may encounter over the month.

If you are going to take up the writing a novel in a month challenge, then please reach out to me, because I'd love to know about it.

Happy writing!