I’m going to write a 50,000 word book in one month. 
Yes you heard that right. Me. The guy who can barely manage to post here regularly is going to actually manage that. To put that into perspective, that means I need to averagely produce 1,666.66….(etc) words EVERY SINGLE DAY for the next month.
And you want to know the fun part? I’m doing this literally on-the-fly. Meaning that there is no plan, no plot, no characters, settings, endings, theories, idealogy – nothing. I’m going to start writing and then just pull whatever I feel like out my arse as I go along and see what nuggets I find amidst the… remains, if you will.
If you have an interest in keeping track of what I’m up to, I’ve put this widget that has a handy-dandy little progress bar on it that I’ll be updating as often as possible —->
Why am I doing this? Well I’ve been at a creative deadlock for a while, you see it’s hard to keep writing just for the sake of it for me, I hate the idea of producing stuff that never gets read or appreciated even though I would love to write just for the **** of it. It’s a mindset. One I want to break, or at least bend. I want to be able to write a volume and maybe use this as a means to flush out a lot of the stuff that has been swirling around my mind because it had no other outlet and maybe my brain will cool down a little once I’m done. Maybe it’ll need a vacation? One I’ll happily provide if I manage to stay the course and complete this thing.
This is something at this moment I plan to do – no matter how good or bad my end result, I will finish this. I say : Kill it all, let the editors sort them out!
With that in mind, I’ve elected to partake in the NaNoWriMo event that takes place once a year, wherein a global collective of writers takes on the challenge of producing a 50K-word work in a month. No other real rules, that’s pretty much it.
From their own site:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word (approximately 175-page) novel by 11:59:59 PM on November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
In 2011, we had 256,618 participants and 36,843 of them crossed the 50K finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
If you want to know more, just click HERE.
I’m still deciding how much of this effort I plan to post up here, so watch this space. The early parts will all be up here, but still unsure if the whole 50K gets blogged!
Anyhow, there you have it folks.
To all the readers who are also taking part in this insane project – best of luck!
To all those along for the ride – Enjoy! ..oh and here are some of my fellow bloggers who are also partaking.
One Honest Writer (TheOthers1)
Words On A Page (Jennings)
Dodging Commas (Stef)
Cheers folks!
One Happy Monk's Reviews 
How are you managing so far? Good luck to you! 🙂
Not too shabby. I’m starting with the aim of each day’s quota being a chapter, some will be at the limit (by force) and others like the 1st might even be over the overall, making the number of chapters fluctuate as I write I suppose. It’s kinda fun because I’ve really gone a bit nuts with this and it’s already getting bizarre! 🙂
Wow – I’m so impressed. Best of luck 😉
Thanks! 🙂 Will be sharing some of the early bits here sooner or later, so let me know what you think.
Will do 😀
Outlines and plot notes are very much encouraged, and can be started months ahead of the actual novel-writing adventure. Previously written prose, though, is punishable by death.
They might be encouraged, but I’m actually enjoying the border-line stream of consciousness writing I’ve done with it so far.
Stick around, I’ll share some soon.
Good for you! I’d love to do that, but it’s just so hard with little kids… ok, maybe I’m making excuses, but free time is always at a premium! Next year, for sure. I know a couple people doing it and I think it’s great. How’s it going so far and what’s your novel about?
Slowly, but it’s going.
It’s hard to explain simply, but it’s about a person with a very specific psychological problem suddenly gaining inordinate amounts of power and is meant to play a little on ethics and morality and perceptions of them, etc.
I imagine it sounds a lot deeper than it will turn out to be 😀
Hope you try it out next year, I’ve read your blog for a bit now and you don’t share much fiction, so – curious.
Bottom line: I’m terrified of writing fiction. It intimidates the heck out of me! Yet it’s an area of writing I need to work on and develop, because I used to have a wonderfully wild imagination as a child and I’m sure I could reconnect with it as an adult. That’s my next challenge…
At the same time, though, real life is SO interesting it’s almost unnecessary to invent worlds and lives and characters. I get such satisfaction from writing about actually individuals and experiences.
No reason you can’t combine the two 😉
How about a fiction story that takes its cues for situations and characters that are directly inspired by or amalgams of real people and situations? That for me can be a real fun part of fictional story-telling.