It’s getting to close to National Novel Writing Month. For those of you who haven’t heard of this…listen up.

Starting November 1st, you sit down and slap down about 1700 words of your breathtaking new novel. Why 1700?

Because it will take 30 days of writing 1700 words to slam together a 50,000 word novel. Notice that I’m not using words like craft and hone and prose? We are literally just dumping words down to get the count up.

This event gets bigger and bigger every year. People are granted permission through this mad idea to just write. This quite clearly is not going to produce War & Peace, but people surprise themselves and end up with something that can then be worked on…later. 

There is something very freeing about knowing you’re just looking for quantity each day, and that quality is not the operative word.

The founder Chris Baty has a book (that resides on my bookshelf) called, No Plot? No Problem! His theory is that we get stuck because we’re trying to be too precious and careful. This sloppy NaNoWriMo process kind of blows our inner editor to smithereens and we’re left to happily muck about.   It’s a great peptalk of a book and irreverent as hell. I found it quite refreshing.

Now the question is…will I do it? I’m still thinking about it. Anyone want to join me? Maybe if I had company….