I am a writer. I like to write. Sometimes I just write about writing.
I am a reader, too, reading, of course, a good bit about writing. I have facorite authors which I follow, but, also I have favorite writers who write articles and sometimes have websites that are enjoyable to me.
There is only a handful that I truly enjoy, and feel I benefit from. I look forward to reading their next post and their next newsletter especially. I almost want to call them my friends, but that would be far too presumptious of me.
I am talking about the likes of Joanna Penn, Shaelin Bishop at Reedsy, August Birch, and John Matthew Fox. They make me comfortable for some reason, and they teach me so much! Being a “Poster-boy for The Imposter Syndrome,” I find myself constantly in search of improvement.
Next month, November, is NaNoWriMo time, National Novel Writing Month, in which many people try to crank out a 50,000 work “book” at the rate of 1667 words per day. And that will wear you down!
Now it costs nothing to enter, and there is no prize if you win. You win only by completing the monumental task. Line up over to your right for your warm feeling.
Mr Fox suggests we can opt for something less intimidating (and possibly end up feeling just as good.) He wrote…
But if you’re a little skeptical or intimidated, I’d also like to give you some alternatives to NaNoWriMo.
These are four modified goals you can choose in the month of November:
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Edit 50k words. If you’re in the editing phase of your book, you too can participate. Simply comb through your manuscript word by word, sentence by sentence, attempting to strengthen it one syllable at a time. This kind of intensive, micro-level editing will pay dividends in improving your writing skills, and it will take longer than you think.
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Write for 2 hours a day. Choose a time period that works for you. Half hour? Hour and a half? And you win if you spend that amount of time trying to write every day (some days it won’t go well).
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Choose a smaller word-count goal. Some of you are artistically opposed to NaNoWriMo, believing that speedy writing results in rubbish prose. Well, fine then. Choose your own goal. Why don’t you resolve to write 10k words this month? That’s 334 words a day. That’s doable, isn’t it?
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Writing Streak. Instead of setting a time goal or word count goal, you could simply aim for a streak. Can you write every day for 30 days without missing a single one?
I like the way he thinks. I have always been a proponent of incrementalism and baby-steps while I’m eating that elephant.
So, what he has done is to have given me the liberty to monkey around with the honored yearly event and shape its demends to where they do me the most good. Make it easier – where it’s almost like breathing. Win-win.
This year I am entering NaNoWriMo.
SayNoMo.
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