Finding Time to Write and Starting NaNoWriMo

In many ways, writers live for story and we live through story. I can’t think of many jobs better than telling stories all the time. I like to think of writing as life distilled. Writers point out the moments and details of life we miss in our fast-paced society.

Writing can draw you deeper into the moment. It can help you understand people and why they do the things they do. If you want to write well, the writing itself will force you to experience your life more fully ~ Joe Bunting.

In the real world, it is stories, fictional and non-fictional, that connect us. We share friends snippets of our lives in the form of a story. Stories that motivate, amuse, anger, confront and console us, and make us smile, and possibly even help us to deal with emotions we may not know how to process.

Joining NaNoWriMo

Confession time- This month, most of my writing will contribute to NaNoWriMo, something I’ve not participated in before.

[NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month – run by a not-for-profit organization to promotes creative writing around the world].

I write professionally for work and I write for pleasure in a variety of forms. These kinds of writing pieces [Thanks Ineke for that tip] can be added to the daily word count. Which is substantial ~

50,000 words for the month of November.

Gasp!

If ever I were to write a book, writing 50,000 words in just four weeks would certainly get the project off to a flying start.

This is my motivation.

Simply talking about writing a book doesn’t cut the mustard. Talk is Talk and NaNoWriMo is about action. As editing comes later, one won’t get caught up with the finer details. Good.

The noble and neighbourly, but never ever nosy, NaNoWriMo emails have given me the following suggestions on how best to complete the writing goal, given my individual circumstances. These are the suggestions:

I. Complete two 40-minute writing sessions on weekdays = 800 words/day.

This is laughingly achievable.

Without editing, and for someone prone to rambling, 800 words is a spit in the ocean. But then, there is this:

II. Complete 6 hours of writing split between days off = 4,250 words

Potentially much more tricky! The jury’s still out on whether this is doable.

NanoWriMo’s Suggestions of getting up early to write sound fine in theory, but my mornings are way too busy.

I am up at 5, doing meditation, Yoga or Qigung, then several times a week there is walking for an hour or so and coffee, before I start work…. you get the picture. I could go all Ayurvedic and rise at 4am! Sunrise is currently around 4.45 am and the Magpies were hunting in my garden for worms at 4am this morning….hmmm.

But the NaNoWriMo team also had a good suggestion for diving right into the writing session: Leave a hook during your shorter writing sessions. Stop in the middle of a scene, or even a sentence, so that you can dive right into the thick of things when you begin again.

Questions for Bloggers

Have you ever deliberately half-finished a blog post so that you could pick it up again easily?

Did that help you dive back into writing again?

Have you ever completed NaNoWriMo?

If so, was it useful? Tips? Downsides? Upsides?