The World’s Tiniest NaNoWriMo
Last time I mentioned that I was going to attempt the “world’s tiniest NaNoWriMo”. I wrote it casually, offhandedly, to avoid the notice of the “No you can’t” voices. No, you’re too busy; you’re too stressed; the pandemic is still taking up too many brain cycles; you haven’t written any fiction since well before the pandemic began. That was all true…but I was determined to try. I picked a work in progress, a lighthearted fantasy novel that I had started for NaNoWriMo 2019. I’d written 20,000 words that November (an official NaNo is 50K words, and most novels are between 80K and 120K, depending on the genre). I’d written only a few thousand words on it since then, but I had an outline to guide me, and I thought I could manage to pick up from where I’d left off. I set the “tiniest possible goal”, 100 words a day, which has worked for me before when trying to restart the flow of creativity after a writing drought. (Those happen to me regularly.) Writing that slowly is not a great way to get a coherent story, especially novel length, but sometimes there’s nothing else to be done. Then I did the smartest thing: almost every evening I went and hung out with my online writer friends, and we challenged each other to “word wars”. You both start writing on your own projects at an agreed-upon time, and stop when the timer you’ve set goes off (usually 10 or 15 minutes,…