FauxWriMo

[davidklecha]

This year, unlike, I think, the last two years, I’m only sort of participating in NaNoWriMo. I actually started the novel I’m working on back in September when I came out of a very productive retreat having thought really hard about working on three different first chapters for three different novels, and ended up just writing one of them well beyond that first chapter. And that’s the typical trap I fall into with NaNoWriMo, not being sufficiently detached from projects in order to focus on a NaNoWriMo-dedicated project, but still kind of wanting to participate in the write-ins and community of the adventure.

(I’m very big on the community of writers–it’s one of my favorite bits of the whole thing, apart from the writing itself.)

The funny thing is, even though I’m expressly not doing an actual NaNoWriMo this year, I have been writing every day, and that’s thanks in no small part to a website called 750Words, which has taught me, in a weird way, how to finally turn off the internal editor and get busy on the process of drafting. It achieves this, in part, by handing out faintly ridiculous little badges which is like crack for a videogame-trained mind. (There’s a much lighter version of this called WrittenKitten, which I found through my sister pointing it out to a friend of ours who wanted a lower pressure version. Simply put: write 100 words, get a picture of a kitten. Write more, more kittens.) I don’t usually write every day, I probably haven’t written every day for more than a week or two probably since I was in high school.

But this month I have and I’m somehow doing it without burning out. So far. It’s a nice feeling, and I hope to keep it going beyond November.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.