This is the last week of October. As excited as I am for the coming weekend, and the enjoyment of all the spooky Halloween fun it brings with it, I’m dreading midnight on October 31st. Not because of any witchy possibilities, mind you. But because when the clock strikes midnight on that evening, November officially begins.
You might be thinking, well geez, Fern, so what?
Well, my friend, that’s when Nanowrimo kicks off. For those not familiar with Nanowrimo, let me pause in my dread to share what that actually is. Nanowrimo is a nonprofit organization that sponsors a writing challenge every November. During the month of November, writers who participate must get down 50,000 words of a brand new novel. Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month.
Of course, some Nanoers are rebels — yours truly for example. That means we work towards writing 50,000 words of any kind in November. I don’t always start a brand new book in November. Sometimes, I work on assorted pieces of short stories, poetry, or novel scenes from more than one project. The key thing is to write 50,000 words, which means 1,677 words per day.
Daunting as the challenge feels, it does a couple things for you as a writer:
- You get words written towards your project goal, making you close in on completing a draft.
- It makes you assess your time, and find places in your daily life where you can get words written. This does wonders for a working writer’s practice as you realize where time is being wasted, and hone in on building a continuous practice for your writing as a job.
- It also forces you to put aside the inner editor that keeps you from just getting the story written. As a writer you often obsess over a single sentence, or word, to such degree that you start revising rather than moving forward to a final first draft.
So, you see, as the time for deciding what project I will work on draws neigh, I’m confronted with the reality that I have done nothing to prepare for this year’s Nanowrimo. Grant you, as a born pantser, or discovery writer, I usually write without outlines or timelines or other well-crafted design documents of any kind. I just start writing, and let it all go where it wants to go. Usually, about half way through a novel, I realize I should probably consider where it is going, so I might pause to design an outline or timeline of some kind.
Most of the time, though, I just write it. It is when the time comes to revise that 
I outline what I already have on the page to find where the plot holes are that need filling. The fact that I’m starting off without an outline doesn’t worry me. What does is that I have been struggling with the section of book two that I absolutely need to finish. Worse yet, I’ve been stuck on this section for a long time. I should by now have some plan for this portion of the book, that remains basically unwritten because really the first draft just said “there’s a war, then they make peace.”
Yeah. No.
Now, I have to write the war. And I’ve never written a war before. And there’s where the dread comes in. At midnight, on October 31st, I will start writing the actual war.
For real…
Like fully.
Wish me luck!