Letting the words flow

Writer’s block keeping you from blogging? Maybe you’ve grown to fear that blinking cursor at the beginning of the white screen? NaNoWriMo might be the key to get you writing! November 1 is the start of the madness and mayhem associated with the National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is an ultimate writing exercise for quantity where you have to write fifty thousand words in the span of thirty days. The nice thing about NaNoWriMo is the community of writers that take the plunge every year. You can find them commiserating each other over the word count, talking about characterization issues, and sharing humorous real life stories of the trouble they get into while writing. If you join, you can blog about how far you’ve gotten, your thoughts on your progress, and maybe put in an excerpt or two to share. You may end with something that isn’t the bext thing you’ve ever written, but this is a great way to get past that fear of putting words down.Who knows? You might find new buddies through this online writing exercise!

Maybe you’re not sure if you can write a novel in the thirty days (who knows, you could opt to blog the whole time!) but you can take a page out of that book and try writing down everything you know about a topic that interests you. It can be something personal, like the trip you took last year, or your pets, or that theory about why the office coffeepot’s always empty when you get to it. Record the impressions you got onto a notebook or an open document editor, and don’t look at what you’ve written. Once you’ve exhausted all the possibilities read through what you’ve written. Are there things that don’t make sense? It’s all right, save them for later. But you might find a sentence or paragraph that works well. It can be the beginning of a post for today.

[tags]writing exercises, nanowrimo[/tags]

Originally posted on October 30, 2006 @ 4:28 pm