October 2008

Writing is among the least expensive hobbies out there - so long as you focus on actual writing, and not tools, toys, seminars and other accoutrements that more often than not, keep us from writing. But it’s a rare aspiring writer who can resist the search for shiny new tools - and I found a few real gems this year.

1.

In fifth grade, Miss Duncan taught us to use index cards to take notes and organize our reports and papers. There was something immensely satisfying about moving those cards around just so… shifting a quote here, a notation there. As an adult, I’ve longed for a means of organizing my thoughts that way - hopefully one that accounted for my now-horrific hand writing.

So when I discovered this nifty little software program that works with virtual index cards that actually look like index cards, I got pretty excited. You can create piles of cards, move the piles within one another, re-order the cards, tag and sort the cards with keywords, color them, mark them according to the intensity of the scene, and so on.

It’s really quite cool.

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One of the greatest things about preparing for NaNo is that you don’t have to prepare at all.   It’s perfectly ok to wake up one day in November, decide to participate, and start churning out words with no characters, no plot, and no genre in mind whatsoever.    A lot of people do just that, and have a blast along the way. 

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So. Where were we?  Oh yeah!  When last we left our intrepid hero, she   had insanely decided to structure the next 30 plus days of her life around National Novel Writing Month.  The really scary part? It just might  work.

You see,  to be truly successful at NaNo requires one of the following approaches:

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(If you already know all about NaNo, feel free to skip ahead to the good parts, where I beg for your participation. Again. )

No, NaNoWriMo is not some sort of exotic disease. It’s far more mundane than that. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month.

Doesn’t sound horribly impressive, does it? Just a silly label for an ordinary month, dedicated to the art and science of noveling, right? Wrong!

NaNo is a creative feast of frustration, insanity, and productivity. The goal is daunting… each participant has 30 days to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch.

It doesn’t have to be a good novel. It doesn’t have to be coherent, publishable, or even readable. It just needs to be 50,000 words presented in the vague shape of a novel, and written entirely in the month of November.

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For those of you following my ongoing organizational & productivity  struggles, I did indeed take Maureen up on her offer of a month’s personal coaching as a challenge/experiment.   We started with a phone call last Monday, a number of emails, and followed up with a slightly mixed-up-call this week.   And things seem to be headed in the right direction - sort of!  

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