It’s Time For NaNoWriMo!
If you’ve noticed that you’re loved ones have gone missing recently, it might be caused by the turning of the calendar. No there’s nothing nefarious going on. It’s just National Novel Writing Month. For those of you not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it’s a month long challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel.
And this is my second year competing.
Last year I didn’t quite make it. I got up to 40,000 words and then the last few days of November were just too hectic. I realized at about 25,000 words, I just didn’t really have a plan. What I needed was an outline and some research notes.
And that’s what I spent the better part of the last year working on. This year’s challenge will be interesting because I actually am doing more writing than ever before. I contribute to four different websites (including Meaning To Work). That’s a lot of content to develop on a daily basis. Do I really have another 50,000 words in me?
Well we will find out.
Fortunately my favorite part of NaNoWriMo is the motivation it provides. Not only is there competition with myself (can I really do it?). There’s competition between friends and authors (it was online friends that first introduced me to NaNoWriMo). But there’s also a visual progress tracking. Last year NaNoWriMo provided a bar graph that updated your status. It provided just that little bit of extrinsic motivation to keep me going.
This year they’ve added more motivations. In the form of statistics! I can now easily see how many words I need to write to meet my daily goal (1667 / day). I can track how many days I’ve met that goal or fallen below it. I can even check my streak on success or failure to meet that word goal.
Why are all these things important? Because the biggest enemy to a writer isn’t writer’s block. It’s not time or energy or ideas. It’s procrastination.
That’s true for all create on demand professionals. If you create content, ideas, or material for a living, you know the days you struggle the most are the days when you’re distracted. Specific, measurable, realistic goals help us to succeed. And NaNoWriMo provides just that.
In my view this is one of the “secret” reasons why NaNoWriMo has been so successful. They’ve recognized that we need both the internal motivation to write but also the extrinsic motivation to actually sit down to do the work.
So here’s hoping that I have the focus to finish my novel this time! In the meantime, we can all benefit from remembering to use SMART goals to keep us focused on projects.
image provided by flickr user Jennie Faber
[...] top of all of this I’m working on the first draft of my second book thanks to the added motivational power of NaNoWriMo, and I am enjoying teaching one of my best classes at Xavier [...]
[...] the second year in a row I managed to complete a 50,000 word book. And yes, I did that in a month. This is both [...]
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About Eric Barrett
Eric Barrett is an organizational consultant who specializes in applying psychology to communication. He has worked as an organizational psychologist for over a decade, and is most recently working on developing social media guidelines for a real estate company. He also teaches psychology at Xavier University. In his spare time he...wait, who are we kidding...he has no spare time.
He is available on a limited basis for speaking engagements and consulting projects. For more information please see the About Meaning to Work page.
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