Ready, Set, Write!

This post is for all you novelists and would-be novelists. November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo if you want to sound cool, or plain old NaNo if you’re super cool and in a hurry). If you want to write a novel but think you don’t have time, or if you think it would be really neat to lock yourself in your garret every evening to drink too much coffee while you pound out your masterpiece, November is your month! All you have to do is write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. That’s less than 1,700 words a day—less than ten double-spaced pages. Totally doable.

Just go to the NaNoWriMo Web site and sign up. It’s free, but they do ask for donations. Then start gathering material, writing notes or an outline—whatever you do to get ready to write. Tell your friends and family what you’re doing, then reassure them that you are not crazy. Use words like “ambitious” and “inspired.” On November 1, start writing. Throughout the month, no matter what happens, write. Don’t wait around for the perfect words to come (that’s what revisions are for). Write. And write some more. At the end of the month you’ll have a first draft of your novel and a nifty NaNoWriMo certificate to hang on your wall. Even better, you’ll know that writing a novel is not impossible.