A boon of creativity.

Have you ever heard of NaNoWriMo? Neither had I. It's short for National Novel Writing Month, and it is in November. The deal is, you sign up on the NaNoWriMo website, for free, and by signing up you commit to try your best to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I guess that's about 175 pages, so it's a fairly short novel, but a novel nonetheless. The whole goal is quantity, not quality at all. So you may very well write 50K words of crap, but you've still written a little novel that you can at least work from and refine. So, at the end of the month, you upload what you've written, the automatic word-counter thing counts your words, and if you meet the word count, you get a "winner!" certificate. Everyone who achieves the goal is a winner. If you don't meet the goal by the deadline, then, hey, at least you tried, and maybe you at least came close. It's all about unabashed creativity. I think it's neat.

I would love to do it, but I fear that I would cave under the pressure. Plus, I've been thinking about it for a week now, and I can't seem to come up with plot ideas. The closest I got was today when I realized that I am capable of writing short stories, but not long ones. Then I realized that I could write a number of short stories about the same characters and then tie them together. Isn't that essentially what a novel is? I don't know. You can sign up anytime before November 1, so I guess I still have time. But what about the fact that with writing all the time, when would I have time to read? And really? 175 pages in 30 days is only about 6 pages a day. And I could totally bang that out. Hmmmm.