Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. I feel sort of bad. It was my intention with this blog (or one of them) to get myself to write more. It only kind of worked. I’ve written some, but posted less.
But that’s the exact reason I want to try NaNoWriMo—to get better/more consistent at writing. NaNoWriMo, for those who don’t know, is National Novel Writing Month. It’s an organization expressly for this purpose: to get writers, budding writers, and those who want to write to actually start writing. The idea is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. Lots of people have done it, and even published their novel afterwards (I actually know one of them).
Even now, I can feel myself getting distracted, wanting to do something else, take a break. But I think I’m going to treat this as a first experiment—write this post pretty much right through, 500 words, in one sitting. That should help me learn to just write and let go.
Now, I’m not exactly intending to follow the NaNoWriMo program. For one thing, I don’t think I could manage ~2000 words per day. Or at least, it would be too much for a first go, I think. I’m hoping for a more modest 500 words per day. And I’m not planning on writing a novel (so the lower word total isn’t as big of a deal). I’ve got one story that might be a novel, a few short stories, and some poetry that I plan to work on. And this blog, probably. That should be enough to keep me busy.
So, I’m not so much trying NaNoWriMo as just jumping on the bandwagon and hoping the feeling of writing with a bunch of other people will help me keep going.
There’s a few caveats I’ve been realizing. One is that, while 500 words of prose isn’t so much, 500 words of poetry is. So if my writing for the day is poetry, I’m not sure how to equate that to my 500-word daily goal. Maybe the one poem will be enough for one day, but I’ll have to see it through till it’s finished. Not sure yet.
Another caveat: I’m sure I’ll forget to actually write some days. I’ll do my best to not allow myself to use a busy schedule as an excuse, but I may well just forget. Whether there should be a penalty for that, or what it would be, I’m not sure. Maybe I’d just have to write more the next day. But that might threaten to just pile up until I’m writing 2000 words in one day anyways.
I hope to use this month as an opportunity to actually finish a number of things I’ve started or sketched. Counting words on those projects will be a bit of a pain, and there may be more or less work involved than the word count indicates, but just learning to finish what I write will be a good skill as well.
It’s funny—I think a lot of the principles of how to write, how to edit, how to avoid/circumvent writer’s block, etc. are similar to the ones I’ve learned studying music composition, so that should help me learn the process. It just remains to me to actually do the things.
We’ll see where we end up on December 1st. It should be a wild ride.
An Unending Suicide Note 