If you’re famil­iar with my Oper­a­tion Twenty12 project, one of the things that I wanted to work on over the course of the year was writ­ing more often. Though I believe that I have slowly started to put out more con­tent, I have still bat­tled with the frus­tra­tion of writ­ing. Not nec­es­sar­ily writer’s block, per se, but just over­com­ing the ret­i­cence to write about what­ever comes to my mind. What can, or could, I do to get over this hump? Well, I spot­ted an arti­cle a few days ago about an annual writ­ing chal­lenge and my inter­est was imme­di­ately piqued.

The National Novel Writ­ing Month, or NaNoW­riMo, is a move­ment, of sorts, that encour­ages aspir­ing writ­ers to draft a novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days. The cre­ation of NaNoW­riMo is inter­est­ing, and you can read all about it here. I did a quick Google search and there appears to be a lot of writ­ers gear­ing up for NaNoW­riMo. Of course, the chal­lenge has its crit­ics. Laura Miller, a writer for Salon.com, wrote a rather crit­i­cal piece about National Novel Writ­ing Month a cou­ple of years ago. Car­olyn Kel­logg wrote a stri­dent coun­ter­point piece in the LA Times. To each their own, I say. If NaNoW­riMo can chal­lenge or encour­age some­one to get an idea out of his/her head…what’s the harm in that?

I have signed up for NaNoW­riMo, and I have about six days to think about a sub­ject, plot, and character(s) for my novel. If you’ve read some of my posts on this blog, you know that I am fully capa­ble of crank­ing out 1,000 or more words in a sin­gle post. Sus­tain­ing that flow of thoughts and words 50 times over seems quite daunt­ing, though. With that said, I think the most chal­leng­ing aspect of NaNoW­riMo is that I have not writ­ten any fic­tion since I was kid. I used to love writ­ing illus­trated, short sto­ries. Since then, how­ever, all of my writ­ing has been short– or long-form, non-fiction essays. Add to that, prac­ti­cally every­thing that I read is non-fiction. Just how in the world am I going to develop and write a fic­tion novel? I guess we’ll see. I see this as a chal­lenge to try out some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent. Some­thing way out­side of my com­fort zone. I am anx­ious, but also excited.

I believe that a cou­ple of friends, who are far more tal­ented writ­ers than I, will be par­tic­i­pat­ing in NaNoW­riMo. What about you? If you do plan to take on the chal­lenge, let me know in the com­ment sec­tion. I’d like to con­nect the peo­ple that I know are par­tic­i­pat­ing. I’d like to use a Spring­pad folder as a place where we can share ideas, sug­ges­tions, tips, and encouragement.

Given that this is a 30-day chal­lenge, You can count on me com­ing back on Decem­ber 1st to let you know what hap­pened. Wish me luck!