Monday, October 11, 2010

To NaNo or not to NaNo

Fall is in the air. The leaves are changing color. The Twins have once again been swept by the Yankees dashing my hopes of a World Series and leaving me with the all to familiar phrase "We'll get 'em next year".
The NaNoWriMo participant badges have been showing up on blogs everywhere.
I am faced with that age old question- To NaNo or not to NaNo.
See in November 2007 I was kinda sorta thinking about maybe being a writer. I mean I wrote in my journal all the time but I had never written an actual novel so I wrote a novel.
I confess I didn't do anything with it. I didn't revise my novel (although now that I've seen teen novels about angels on the shelves I kinda wish I had). But I did realize that being a writer was something I really really wanted to do.
The next year, 2008 I did NaNo again. I wrote something that I never even read again but I wrote. I also took a class, The ABCs of Writing for Children. I wrote a story inspired by my cat running out of my condo when I got home from work every night and me chasing him through the halls, usually still wearing my bike helmet and brightly colored clothes from my bike ride home. My story from class got published in Stories for Children Magazine in Sept 2009.
Last year was 2009 and the idea for my novel did not come to me on November like good little NaNo ideas. She came to me in June. So I decided to try this whole write a novel slowly thing. I'm currently nearing the end of draft 2 but I can't decide if I should do NaNo again. I don't want to abandon my WIP but I think that great creative things happen during NaNo. And I miss NaNo.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a difficult question. If you can finish draft 2 before November, I'd say do it! That way, you can take a break from your current WiP and perhaps get a new WiP out of it. :)

And thank you for following my blog!

Unknown said...

The goal of doing NaNo is definitely motivating me to get through my revision.