If you are a frequent reader of my blog or you glanced at my Twitter in the past month or so you may have seen that I was participating in NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is… firstly, where have you been? And secondly, I’ll explain in brief: National Novel Writing Month takes place in November every single year and is a challenge in which participants try to write 50,000 words over the span of 30 days. The idea is to set up consistent writing habits over the month. Always said you wanted to write a book? November is the time. But you haven’t planned it out to within an inch of its life? Whoops, sorry, no time to delay, the focus is just on getting the daily 1667 words down and you can worry about the finer details later.
In many ways, NaNo helps me to circumvent my natural indecisiveness. I don’t have time to ponder over decisions and faff about considering the implications because otherwise I wouldn’t meet my daily word count. The mistake I made in previous NaNoWriMo attempts was that I got stuck at this, rather than seeing it as an opportunity to let go and go with the flow, even if that flow was ultimately wrong for the story I was trying to get down on paper/screen. This year I decided to write a story that was less demanding and/or high concept – rather than my ordinary attempt to write a quite complicated fantastical system (at which point I’d realise I hadn’t done enough preparation pre-November), I plumped for a simplistic, trope-filled contemporary story on the spur of the moment. Although I had a Pinterest board with a grand total of 5 things pinned, I had little to no plot points decided and I didn’t even have names for the characters; instead, I had to name characters on the fly and, as I sat down every day to write, I mostly had no idea what scene was going to come out of the writing session.
