#9: Aoife’s NaNoWriMo For Working Writers
It’s a busy time of year for writers. October’s spooky festivities have brought us out of the woodwork for various horror, thriller and horror-comedy themed events. We’re telling scary stories around a (fake) fire at Can You Keep A Secret at the end of the month, in a very special deviation from the usual monthly backyard poetry event. And The Braddyton has been redecorated with stretchy spiderwebs, costume-blood-filled goblets and skeleton toys for our October 5 event which welcomed in the season. But for those with a habit of constantly looking round the proverbial corner, you’ll know the busy-ness doesn’t end on October 31.
November marks the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a one-month marathon wherein writers around the world lock in to clock up 2,000 words per day on their chosen project. It’s a beautiful experience. It’s also kind of intense. And I would argue, not built for the working writer.
This might be a misconception, but I imagine three target audiences for NaNoWriMo. Those who can afford to take time off, those who don’t work except on their manuscript and those who work non-writing jobs and appreciate large swaths of writing time as a ‘break’.
Working writers, however, can regularly clock up to 2,000 words per day. And coming home to write more is not a break and may not even be productive. Try writing 4,000 instead of 2,000 words per day during NaNoWriMo and you’ll see what I mean – your brain can turn to soup about halfway through and anything left is unusable.
So I propose an alternate NaNoWriMo for working writers. The National Non-Stop Writing Month. The change is simple: clock up 2,000 words per day on anything. If you write 1,000 words of website copy for your marketing job in a day, come home and write 1,000 words of your project. Or of many. In this alternate version, I recognise that we’re not just working on novels and you are indeed allowed to finish a short story halfway through your allotted daily word count then begin something else. These pieces are valuable, too.
We’re celebrating NaNoWriMo at The Braddyton by
launching a community Discord. Feel free to log on and post your daily progress for writey-accountability or feedback at any time – but we will also have scheduled writing sessions almost every day of November from 12:30pm-4:30pm AEST. The full schedule will be posted in the Discord and on
The Braddyton community Facebook page soon.
During the sessions, we’ll be quietly writing until someone reaches their 2,000-word daily goal and then taking a break and exchanging feedback. After the break, we’ll repeat until another person has reached the goal. We’re Pavlov-ing ourselves into doing the thing, you guys.
You don’t have to be there for every minute of every session. Drop in whichever days you’re free, at any point within those times. If you’re here, you’re on time.
We will not have an in-person writing meet-up in November for this reason.
At the end of the month, we’ll be hosting an open mic where you can share your NaNoWriMo creations! More details on this later.
Word Count: 529