It is November, which means it is now National Novel Writing Month! If you have not heard of this before, it is a tradition which has been going for quite a while now in which everyone and anyone who has wanted to write can! If you want more info, I recommend checking out their official site. I have always tried to participate and some years are better than others (which seems to be a common experience among those who participate), but the point is to spend the month taking time to make yourself write. There have been many authors who decided to participate in this new tradition and wrote their first book or finished something and got it published. Now of course the point of the month isn’t to get something published unless that’s a dream of yours and you want to continue to pursue it, but even for veteran authors, it is a time to devote to creating something fun. Choosing to participate in National Novel Writing Month gives you a little bit of structure to your day, requiring authors to hit a minimum daily word count (their target is over 1,600 words a day, but personally I have come to find I feel the most comfortable targeting 1,000 words a day). Organizers have also developed and shared ways to contact other writers and find local writing events in your area. But if you just want to write and have fun, you can do that too – this is my plan for this year’s event! I’ve been spending the last year working on and revising my stories and creating new stuff for the website, so I wanted to start from scratch and just write to see if I can get 30,000 words of something in the can. I’ve already written one novel, and am currently a third of the way through my second, so this could turn into a third novel or maybe this will just be “the fun exercise of 2022”. Either way, it will be good practice.
This year, I’d like to write something that is not Science Fiction based. Maybe fantasy, maybe romance, maybe a little bit of everything which is what I feel a lot of people want in a story. I’ve just started thinking about the story, but not my usual amount because I want to try and just let it flow. I’ve been doing a lot of career development work through planning, article writing, and working on new projects and ideas I’ve had, but haven’t just sat down and seen what comes out in a while. I think it’s a good way of just trying to make yourself jump off that anxiety and just start to create. It is really nice to see that putting in days of work results in pages of a new story come to life. I think the point of the National Novel Writing Month is to try and show people that strengthening your writing can help you in a myriad of ways you don’t even know about when they are happening. But take it from someone who continues to write and write and love it more and more, give National Novel Writing Month a try - you may just love it a lot!