An Alternative to NaNoWriMo

“Sometimes a story has no end.”

Happy National Novel Writing Month, everyone! Earlier this month, Denzel wrote a fantastic piece on the basics of NaNoWriMo, er—ahem—#NaNoWriMo that provides a fantastic introduction to those of you unfamiliar with this month-long exercise in sanity. Celebrated across the United States for the entire month, NaNoWriMo is one of those events that appears just as terrifying as it actually is.  Fifty thousand words?! That’s a remarkable amount of work for a single month.

But I suppose that’s the appeal, isn’t it? At the end of 30 painstaking days, you have a novel in front of you.

But then what? What becomes of those fifty thousand words? What do you do when December 1^st rears it cold, ugly head and all you have to show for the month is a word document with countless unusable passages and multiple grammatically questionable sentences. What becomes of all your worrying, second-guessing, and coffee-fueled temper tantrums because that guy two tables down just will not stop tapping his foot to the beat of a song you can hear above the roar of the café you’re sitting in?

For most of us: nothing. Nothing will happen to that manuscript.

Nothing will come from our hard work.

No one will ever read our words and share their thoughts.

Nobody will care what happened to what’s her name or what path that one guy chose.

National Novel Writing Month, or How I Learned to Stop Editing and Love the Pressure

Some people like to run in races, from the short and sweet 5K to the more arduous 10k. There are even people who can knock out the 21K Half-Marathons or their twice as grueling sibling the 42K Full-Marathon. I'm not here to teach you about long-distance running, although I'm sure I'd find a way to make it fun, but rather to talk about that truly terrifying goal that rears it's head every November.

50K

Luckily for me, my joints, and my cardiovascular system, that number isn't a representation of physical distance. Instead it's shorthand for 50,000. As in 50,000 words. As in the 50,000 words that make up the novel you could be writing this month. 

NaNoWriMo is always a fun time of the year. Crazy, tiresome, a little reckless even, but certainly a fun time and an unforgettable experience. It provides you the goal, the deadline, and the community necessary to get your butt in gear and crank out a novel. This can be rather scary for people, especially someone like myself who is married to the backspace key, and might be having an affair with the delete key (that's just a rumor though). 50,000 words, one month, how can you do it? Luckily there plenty of people out there who have plenty of tips on how to survive NaNoWriMo, some of the most common being 

1. Just dive in.

2. Worry about all that editing later.

3. Kiss your social life goodbye for the next 30 nights.

As long as you follow rule #1, the rest is golden. Treat this like I treated every track and field day in elementary school and go for gold because you'll at least get a consolation medal. Worst-case scenario the month ends and you're left with more words than you started with, words you can continue to work with and around for as long as you want. Edit them, delete them, ignore them, at the end of the day it's all in your hands, or as I guess is more apt in this era, at your fingertips.

And now for some fun NaNoWriMo stats:

• In 2012 there were 341,375 participants
• 3,288,976,325 words were written.
• Minneapolis was the 10th most active U.S. city, and the 16th overall
• I managed to crank out 31,284 words, nearly double my product from 2011
• You could be writing right now
• So go do that

Enjoy NaNoWriMo Everyone!

Minneapolis Rocked NaNoWriMo!

Everyone knows that NaNoWriMo ended last week, but have you seen the stats about this year's participants? It's amazing! Stats for NaNoWriMo are split into two categories: Main and the Young Writers Program. For NaNoWriMo Main, there were 256,618 participants in 2011! Up from 2010's 200,530 participants. And 36,744 of those writers completed their goal of 50,000 words! Everyone wrote a total of 3,074,068,466 words!!!

Moving on to the NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program, there were 81,040 participants in 2011, up from 2010's 68,710! There were 16,334 writers who completed their goals and everyone wrote a total of 368,143,078 words!
These numbers are absolutely astounding and we couldn't be more thrilled for the writing community. We're looking forward to reading some of these masterpieces in the years to come!
But to be honest, the stats that I love most are for the Top 50 NaNoWriMo Cities (according to Google Analytics, based on number of November visits from these fine places). And the reason? Out of ALL the cities in the WORLD, Minneapolis made the list at #12. We couldn't be more proud.

National Novel Writing Month

Looking for a challenge? Why don't you try writing 50,000 words in 30 days. That may sound impossible, but that's the goal of NaNoWriMo. They claim that "For one month, you get to lock away your inner editor, let your imagination take over, and just create!"

Now don't get me wrong, as an editor, this idea is terrifying: not edit my writing? How could I do such a thing? But the purpose of National Novel Writing Month isn't to come away with this perfect, 175-page, bound masterpiece. The purpose is to get as many words written down as possible.There are plenty of skeptics, people who say quality is more valuable than quantity, and when it comes to publishing your book I agree. But who says you have to publish this? Or that you have to try to get it published on December 1st after your writing time is up? The amazing thing about NaNoWriMo is that if you can beat the challenge, you'll have 50,000 words to work with later on! If you spend all of November putting your thoughts to paper, you can spend the next 11 months refining those words. And creating a novel in under a year is definitely something to be proud of.