Writing a Novel
There are a lot of people writing a novel while I’m writing this very post. Some have outlines and character concepts. Some don’t. Some have expectations of writing 50,000 words this month, it is National Novel Writing Month after all. Another year of NaNoWriMo is upon us and with it 4 weeks finger-bleeding creativity.
I for one am not participating due to the hectic-ness of my personal situation. That and the last time I tried was a complete flop and I’m in no better arena to think it would be different this year. My creativity runs high but to write a 50,000 words within a month creativity is not all that you need. You need time, you need to be able to write fast without worrying about editing, and you need strategies to quickly shake any writer’s blocks you will get along the way.
Developing characters while developing a plot is no easy feat. In fact doing either one of those I find to be quite a difficult undertaking. Remember, a novel is fictional. You can’t just be writing the story of your life or the life of another outright. If you’re going to do that you have to at least hide it under the guise of a different world, a post-apocalyptic era, a culture and set of beliefs unknown to today’s mind.
There is so much that has yet to be written or thought of, that within each new novel the possibilities of mental expansion to help us solve world issues or more importantly help us cope with daily life are better laid out before us. This is not just for the readers but for the writers as well. Think about how much better you’d feel after you tackled writing a novel? Checking that doozy off your list. What can you accomplish next? When you buckle down and accomplish something difficult that you didn’t have to it’s mind blowing. There are a million things in the world to do and you just found you can accomplish any one of them if you set your goals to do it.
Cheers to you NaNoWriMoers. If you can even jot down 5,000 words consider it a damn good start.
