So today is the official beginning of the classic National Novel Writing Month, when everybody and their aunt tries to write 50,000 words (roughly 175 manuscript pages) of a novel in 30 days. It’s not easy, but it is far from impossible. It requires writing about 1665 words per day, which is about 6.5 double-spaced pages, which is within the realm of possibility even on a busy day, and sometimes, especially on a busy day.
This means a few things.
- You must be obsessive about your story, thinking about it constantly. Easy.
- Every time you have at least five minutes free, you need to sit down and write something: a conversation, a description of a setting or a person, an outline of a scene. Harder, mostly for you.
- You will probably write during meals, in line at the grocery store, on the train, etc. Harder, mostly for other people.
If all that sounds insane to you, you’re probably not a writer. Don’t feel bad. Probably there are lots of people out there, conventionally normal people, who can survive not writing about invisible people.
Probably.
buildingapoem 
How many times have you done the NaNoWriMo baptism by fire?
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Interesting question: Strictly speaking once in 2008m when I wrote 44,200 something words in thirty days. But I have also found myself writing, without hard work, one to two thousand words a day
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I tried this once. I wrote a lot of incoherent stuff that fell off the premise and went to some other place, then to a whole different set of characters. Total hot mess on my part. It was fun to try though.
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Messy often = fun. If more writers figured this out, fewer writers would be alcoholics, I think. I am on an FB group that is all about the ninja writers’ NaNo experience, and there are tons of posts about Outliners vs. Pantsers. (Seat of the…) I think iterations of each is what works best. But it can teach you how to take advantage of the 5 or 10 minutes here or there in the day to produce. I am now very capable of writing 15-25,000 words per month, with long breaks when I burn out, but still.
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Oh, no. Then it must also be NaDissWriMo.
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