NaNoWriMo - Day Seven: One Week Down . . .

Well, I'm one week into the NaNo experiment, and so far things are going better than I'd expected. I mean the writing quality itself pretty much stinks, but it has been doable to meet the goals each day. Well, except for the two dud days. Plus yesterday when I stayed up half the night. But overall, four out of seven days went smoothly, and I can live with that! ;)

Today I completed 1,798 words, for a total of 9,227. That means tomorrow I should cross over 10,000 words. I'm really getting into this quantity over quality thing. I think I can learn a lot just from writing thousands and thousands of words, regardless of how many are actually usable in any public venue. I keep telling my children that the best way to learn is to practice. Even if you start off unskilled, with practice something is bound to improve. I keep hoping, anyway!

Now, I mentioned yesterday that I'd explain about the shovel of death. When I signed up for NaNo, I had no idea how geeky these people were. Almost as geeky as I am! So they have this whole culture on the forums there, where they support one another and generally get together to commiserate and blow off steam between chapters. And one of the traditions that has taken on a life of its own at NaNo is the shovel of death.

Basically, when the Shovel of Death thread comes up on the forum, people who want to participate immediately begin working out how to incorporate a murder (or at least serious injury) by shovel into their day's writing. Then they tell their fellow NaNo's the results of their experiments into shovel deaths. Some of the people on the forums tell how they have incorporated shovels of death into every NaNo project they've ever attempted.

The shovel of death is a good example of the kind of writing NaNo encourages. It doesn't have to be perfectly original. All of life is full of cliches, after all. But rather, it is about using your creativity to come up with fun and imaginative takes on those familiar ideas.

If you think that's fascinating, just wait - in the coming days I'll explain about some more amateur writer terms like "write or die", "word sprints", "plot bunnies" and "pantsers"! You know you can't wait!