Thursday, 1 November 2012

NaNoWriMo

Every November, some people get together for mutual support and encouragement online and in person in a project to write a 50 000-word novel in a month.  This is called NaNoWriMo and it's here:


At the end of the month, you get a certificate recognising that you've done it and in some places there are local groups who have a get-together to share their success and celebrate it.  I did it last year, when i wrote a  novel called 'Seven Stories', which took inspiration from 'Walking On Glass' to tell seven stories with no apparent connection which were woven together at the end.  I'm not doing it this year because i'm too busy writing my own projects.  I waffle a bit more about NaNoWriMo and self-publishing here and in the text underneath it:


(YouTube seems to be really committed to making my thumbnails as awful as possible).

Therefore, if you want to read more about that, go and watch the video.

I have something else to say really, which i briefly touch on in the video:  NaNoWriMo seems to address the opposite problem to mine.  My difficulty is brevity.  I have no problem at all writing 50 000 words a month, although writing 50 000 words of good stuff is imponderable because i have no idea what would make it good or bad (see http://homeedandherbs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/why-i-dont-read-proper-books.html for more details).  Leaving that aside, my version of NaNoWriMo is NaNONoWriMo - write 50 000 words fewer for a month.  That's a little facetious though:  what i mean is, shorten what i've written by 50 000 words.

I am pretty sure my writing falls into the category of hypergraphia, and i sometimes think Liz's has done so as well on occasion.  Hypergraphia is a nicely medicalising word which means a compulsion to write.  Since it's associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, that makes it more likely.  My problem is not fluency but achieving brevity and stopping myself from writing.  Writer's block does happen to me but it manifests itself as writing something other than what i'm aiming to write, not being reluctant or unable to write.  I go off-topic rather than stop writing, but i write more off-topic than i would've on what i'm supposed to be writing.  It would be interesting to know what subjects are common in hypergraphia because of other associations with temporal lobe epilepsy.

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