November is National Novel Writing Month and this year like last year I’ll be participating.  Nanowrimo is  The general premise is that you spend the 30 days from November 1st through the 30th to write a 50,000 word rough draft of a novel.  This falls into the category of things I like in theory.

The Boy loves it.  He spends every spare moment off writing somewhere.  For the next few weeks coffee shops become more exciting to him than Disneyland.

For me the entire process comes off feeling a little like work, but I think that is mostly because of a general lack of time in my life.  What I love about Nanowrimo is that you actually begin to notice your writing skills maturing.   A big part of this is just the confidence to know that you’ve already done it once, but there’s also the ability to look back and ask, what makes this hard for me?

I had a horrible time last year.  I kept wanting it to be something that it wasn’t and I was afraid to shift gears once it got started.   this only led to a major story meltdown about 30,000 words in. Full on characters dropped out, storyliines were abandoned and the main character MOVED as a means of starting things over. oy vey.   It would have been better if I had just let things be a little more flexible as they went.

The other thing that I’m doing this year… is letting the book have an opinion.  Last year I struggled to produce something well crafted, with beautiful writing, and with a simple happy story that nobody could take issue with. This year, I’m letting my personal world views seep in.  The more I read the more I realize that this is unavoidable. For example: With the help of two friends I recently finished Atlas Shrugged– there’s some hefty philosophy contained there, and I disagree with it, but I can still marvel at the story.

SO, this year, while I’m trying to let things develop organically, I made the decision to include 3-4 hot button issues.  This way I can let my soap-boxing fuel the story if needed.

Feel free to ask me how it’s going! I’m sure I’ll have different answers depending on how close we get to the 30th.  My fellow bloggers Sychela at The Cameraphone Diaries and Austin at FabulousApple have written Nanowrimo kick off posts similar to this… you should ask them how it’s going too. 🙂