Today’s the first day of National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, the aim is fairly simple – write a novel (well, a first draft, anyway) in a month. The NaNoWriMo website suggests a total length of 50,000 words (or 1,666 words a day) – around the length of Twelve Minutes to Midnight.
There are plenty of NaNoWriMo naysayers who insist that it’s an unproductive or impossible exercise – that any novel written in a month can’t be any good, or that writing to an arbitrary deadline is unhelpful – but I think that anything that inspires people to try something new is a worthwhile enterprise, even if it’s not for everyone… and supposedly, Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in just three weeks, so evidently haste and literary brilliance are not entirely anathema to each other.
If you’re taking part this year and you’re writing a novel for children, why don’t you tell us about it in the comments section below? What are you writing about? How difficult are you finding it? Is this your first attempt at writing a novel?
