I’m a huge fan of this idea. How liberating would it be to turn out 50,000 words of pure crap? Tell your internal editor to stuff it and let the words flow!
50,000 words in 30 days. It doesn’t have to be good, you don’t have to try to shop it around, just write!
I think I have to do this. I think I’ll be very mad at myself if I don’t.
Hrm… looks interesting actually. Heh… though technically I already do stuff like that every month with all my RPing though it’s a number of different c’s etc etc… I wonder if they want some semblance of continuity or you could just jump all over the place?
Heh… I suppose I could try it… I have a few story ideas that I have a vague idea about but not where they go or anything… I’ll think on it the rest of this week before I sign up though
This sounds like fun…my thesis proposal is due Hallowe’en, and since I won’t be hearing back from the committee for a couple of weeks (and thus probably won’t be starting the actual writing) I’ll actually have some free time to try something like this.
Besides, it’ll be nice to write something that doesn’t consist of words like “metalepsis,” “panegyric,” and “intertextuality.”
It seems like it’s worth trying, but there’s also a WHOLE lot of crud out there which written in a similar way.
I was studying up on recent children’s books, reading a very popular “chapter book” author, Catherine Applegate. After her second book, I thought “Foo! I Could write something like that in three weeks!” Then I read in an interview it took her two weeks.
It’s taken many months for me to get 50,000 words to where I want someone to read them. Writing that much in 30 days would, for me, end up being junk.
Significantly, though, it would take longer to rewrite to make presentable than it took to write in the first place.
Perhaps you didn’t even look at the link. The point is not to write a best selling novel, full of everything great literature should be. The point is to write.
I am almost there on my current novel that I am writing. I wouldn’t have guessed that 50k words was 175 pages though. It doesn’t look that way on the 8.5X11 pages. It is pretty encouraging to see that it basically doubles the page output with what you right. Good luck to everyone who signed up!
The issue is that the “sit down every morning and write for 5 hours” is that it assumes that all writing is worthwhile writing. Chances are many of your favorite books were not written this way. (I know most of my favorite books weren’t.)
It’s a matter of learning bad habits.
I’ve tried “writing as many words as I can” in one day. It hasn’t produced anything I’ve looked at twice.
Daowajan and anyone else that might be on Live Journal, there is a community (nanowrimo2002) up and running. Just FYI.
partly_warmer, to a certain extent I see your point. Truly I do. But on the other hand, I think it’s a great exercise. Not only to touch base again with when writing could be fun, but to clear out a lot of the little bits and pieces running around that don’t fit anywhere else.
In other words, I want to finally vomit up a lot of crap that I get stuck on, trying to fit it in other places.
I’ve been dealing with terrible writer’s block for the better part of a year. Bad timing, since I’m unemployed and theoretically should have lots of time to work on my first novel.
I think this contest might be just the thing to break the block.
partly_warmer, I don’t think the idea is to get in the habit of pumping out as many words as quickly as one can, but to set a deadline to just get you going and keep you going. For a lot of people, just getting over the fear of starting is hard, and this makes it a little more fun and easy, with so many other people doing it too, and making a game of it. Worrying about whether anything you write is going to be good enough is a surefire way to keep yourself from writing anything at all, I think.
Actually, someone started a thread about NaNo over in Cafe Society, but it dropped off the page and was lost and forgotten.