[Juneberry]

I'm curious, does anyone here take part in NaNoWriMo or it's more lenient cousin, Camp NaNoWriMo? If you're not sure what it is, let me summarize: NaNoWriMo is a writing event held every November. It stands for National Novel Writing Month (even if it's international at this point). Writers all take on the same challenge: to write 50,000 words of fiction in just the 30 days of November. Sound crazy? As for  Camp... Well, Camp is a choose-your-own goal version that takes place both in April and July. Since it's officially camp prep month, I began to wonder who else here participates. Maybe we can help each other reach our goals! That'd be neat, right?

[Lain]

I don't participate mainly because I'm not a huge fan of explicit deadlines, especially if it's involving creative work.
That being said I do try to write more during November, and GF also tries to participate (although gives up after three days typically haha.) I'm still working on getting her to read more often; she wanted to read 1984 finally just because everyone else seems to have read it and I had a spare copy from my utopian lit. class, but she keeps getting stuck at chapter 3 and claims she doesn't have the time.

I was never great at fiction, sadly. I really try to 'freestyle' as much of my writing as possible on the first iteration/draft, but once I start reading it over for editing and general revision I realize that everything is so closely related to my own personal experiences to the point where it hardly feels like fiction at all to me (and by extension, since I'm a relatively boring person, it feels more like a slice-of-life kind of novella or even a d*** memoir) and then I get into that weird mindset that I need to change everything, which in turn causes me to hate everything that I threw down on the page.

Oh well. I guess I just need to practice creative writing some more. Maybe sometime in April after exams...

[Darth-Apple]

That's a fairly large amount of writing within a month. Do you get a prompt for a specific topic or constraints to follow, or do you more or less have the freedom to take it how you wish?

[Lain]

That's a fairly large amount of writing within a month. Do you get a prompt for a specific topic or constraints to follow, or do you more or less have the freedom to take it how you wish?

Basically full creative freedom. And since it's all basically public domain work, you can use copyrighted characters and write fanfics too as an entry, as they quote:

"If you believe you're writing a novel, we believe you're writing a novel too."

And eh, 1500 words a day isn't too bad. If you're not used to writing a lot (or if you don't read a lot either) then it might seem daunting, but 1500 words is 6 pages double spaced size 12, 1" margins. Double-spaced pages really aren't hard to write, takes me a couple minutes anyway, and if you already have your ideas in mind then it just gets faster.

The official contest rules state that it's only the writing portion that you can't do before the start; you can extensively plan out your novel and come up with story, characters, main events, etc. before the official starting date. So if you get started a week before with planning, then you can usually get through the month having written your 50k or more.
That's why there are so many people who participate haha.

EDIT: Apparently, the word count for The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) is just about 40k. It's an 80 page long book or so (or at least well below 100pgs for my copy) so 50k words would translate roughly into 100 regular book pages. None of the really long page types like the ones you'll find in Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest or something, but typical, like Harry Potter (since I'm sure everyone's familiar with that.) I'd read that in probably a little less than two hours, so 2-3hrs is probably a good median range to get an idea of the length.

So if you go at it for an hour a day throughout november, you'd have written 30hrs worth of material, and of course reading is always faster than writing, but even if we boil down 90% of it from 30 to 3hrs, that's reasonably what we would expect.

[Darth-Apple]

It just takes a good spurt of inspiration on a larger writing as such. Writing 100 pages would be easily doable with excellent ideas and a good flow with it. I tried to write something many years ago that just came off my fingers like it was easy.

And then there are times when it's exhausting to even write two pages. 100 pages isn't necessarily harder in terms of inspiration, but it does mean you have so much more pressure. Pressure can either be very good or horrible for creativity, and for me, it's the latter. It stifles it rather than improving it.