NaNoWriMo

Well, another busy month down in the books (see what I did there?). Well, this month is NaNoWriMo and sadly, I cannot take part in it. If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it is basically an attempt to write a book in one month.

Authors attempt to write 50k words in the month which is a small novel. A lot of authors accept this challenge and take it a step further, attempting to write 100k words, a standard novel length. Now bear in mind, this is just the first draft and its not expected that an author start the book on the 1^st and publish on the 30^th. Even so, that is a huge undertaking. For the challenge, that is the equivalent of 1,666 words a day, double if you are trying to write a whole novel. Which in other terms, is a standard(ish) chapter or two every single day. Now, that sounds like cake, right? Nope. Unless you are a full-time author, it is hard to dedicate this amount of time to writing every single day. Also, there are no breaks during this challenge, these numbers reflect effort put in every single day throughout the month which can really drag.

Most people have heard of writers block or experienced it themselves. This is a great exercise to break down those walls and push a whole book through those respective walls in a short amount of time. Now, I’ve talked about how difficult this can be for some authors. I am one of those authors. However, there are many authors out there that can write a significant amount of words on a daily basis. When I mentored under Dakota Krout, he had a daily goal of 5k words. I believe he took the weekends off. However, he is crazy enough to demand that from himself on the weekends too. So, the challenge of NaNoWriMo is an easy day/month for him. There are many other authors that can do this as well. If you do the math on Dakota’s numbers, he writes a standard novel every four weeks, taking the weekends off, consistently. I’ve even heard him talk about pushing his numbers to 10k a day. Not sure if he is doing that right now. If you look at release dates for Dakota’s books, you’ll see that it reflects his dedication to writing a lot, consistently.

In the end, an author moves at the pace they need or want to. Some set deadlines for themselves, or have the deadlines set for them by publishers. Some, have no deadlines at all. Some are part time while others are full time. You have authors like Patrick Rothfuss who released his first book in 2007 and his next book in 2011, finding huge success in those novels. Then there are the Dakota’s of the world, who has released 11 books (and counting) in 2020. Some of these are box sets and such but it doesn’t discount the work that goes into each.

This blog post has sort of derailed from where I thought it would but that is the point of these. To just write whatever is on my mind for the month. Time to get back to answering 911’s and saving lives!

See you next month!