or NaNoWriMo as it is called by people with time to spare or National Novel Writing Month by people who are willing to go the whole hog. The Express starts November 1 and careens at top speed to November 30 – it’s goal to get writers to pump out 50,000 words in those 30 days.
First off this is no longer National but International – damn Americans aren’t willing to admit the scale of things – hardly surprising when weather reports from, say Detroit, have the weather ending at the border.
I jumped on board last year for the first time having heard about it in the last week of October at a writing workshop. I thought ‘I could do this.’ Luckily I came up with a very simple concept that kept presenting me with new plot, character and action every day and left me with enough material that demanded I finish it this year.
Over the past week I’ve gone over that first draft in detail. I did pull parts of it out for the writer’s workshop at Loyalist this past summer where the feed back was overwhelmingly positive.
How my premise bloomed was to by making a list of twenty-five possible things or circumstances in which my character could be impacted or impact others. I started with one of them and it lead to more and more. I think I only used about 4 or 5 of the possibilities on my list and some them when I needed to keep things going.
I pounded out about 60,000 words by the end of November 2010 – the world at my tingling fingertips. I knew as I was writing that I wasn’t going to keeping everything once I started to edit – I even had a few half-scenes that I realized weren’t pushing the story but I did keep them for the word count – after all I did write them in the time frame.
As I did last year I’ll be posting my daily 2011 and cumulative word count on Facebook.
