Get Ready to Write 50,000 Words

NaNoWriMo is upon us

It's that time of year again...for jaunty jack o' lanterns, regrettable costumes, misshapen gourds, AND NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. It starts this coming Tuesday, November 1st!!!

While its name specifies novels, there are no NaNoWriMo rules against writers in any genre participating. And so, you can use this opportunity to make enormous headway on your book, whether you’re writing a novel, memoir, short story collection, essay collection, children’s book, or book of poems.

Sign up here and join hundreds of thousands of people around the world aiming to write 50,000 words in one month's time.

Ambitious? Yes. Impossible? Not at all.

Here's the breakdown of work: 50,000 words divided by 30 days = 1,666 words per day.

1,666 words divided by 250 words/page = 6.66 pages per day.

You can do it! And here's why: this is a draft. Your words don't need to be brilliant (yet). You don't need to have the plot totally figured out. You might switch between first person and third person omniscent just to see which suits your novel.

You can go off on tangents, do a deep dive into a character you'll later decide to drop, tell the story in reverse chronological order, write every other chapter in present tense and every other in past, etc.

Go wild! This is your time to experiment.

Producing pages is your one and only writing goal for November. That's it. And you’ll have plenty of support from the NaNoWriMo community, including on social media, to write each day for 30 days.

Then, on December 1, when you look at what you've written, you’ll see that you have the makings of a real novel. Or memoir. Or essay collection. And you’ll also have gotten in the habit of writing every day—a habit you might choose to continue.

Good luck! I’m excited for you.

If you’ve participated in NaNoWriMo or similar events in the past or plan to this year (or are tempted to but are unsure), please share your experience, thoughts, etc. Thanks, as always, for being such a wonderful contributor to this growing writer’s community!