It has always seemed to me that a large proportion of librarians really want to be writers. Actually, let’s face it, a large proportion of non-librarians really want to be writers. The sad fact is however, that the vast majority of these would be literary greats never even get around to starting their masterpiece. That’s where NaNoWriMo comes in. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is the sort of thing that might give you the spark you need to get going. The basic idea is that you try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Thats 1667 words per day. Every day. For a month.

I first tried Nano a couple of years ago and from memory I may have written a few thousand words. I can’t even remember what the story was. Last year I tried again and got to 16,000 words. I know that is a far cry from 50,000 but I have kept plugging away on that story and it is currently close to 30,000. Still a long way from being complete. But I’m proud of it.

I (perhaps foolishly) have decided to give it another go. I’ll try for 50,000 but don’t really care if I make it or not. if I can get 10,000 or 20,000 I’ll be extremely happy.

Have you always wanted to write a novel but never had the motivation to start. Do you have a few plot notes buried in your sock drawer? Do you dream of living the blissful life of a full time writer? Then why not join me and thousands of others in giving NaNoWriMo a shot. You can se my NaNo profile here and make me a writing buddy if you like.

Here’s some thinking music to help you decide:

Wherever you happen to be reading it now, Jonathan published this post at: BookBoy.net

I have a guest post up at Blurb it, a blog run by the Gold Coast City Library. It lists some of my favourite books of recent times and will be followed soon by a post of books I am looking forward to reading this year.

For book lovers in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, Vetti has been posting about some of her local second hand bookstores here, and here.

On the writing front, I recently read an article by Cory Doctorow with a few writing tips including a target of 250 words per day, every day. His logic being that this can be done in 20 minutes and could get you a novel in less than a year. My previous target of 4-5000 words per week was not happening. Even 2000 per week was hard as I would end up trying to do it all on Sunday night. But 250 words, he’s right, I can do that in 20 minutes. Even less. I can do it on the short train ride between Ashburton and Camberwell. I also leave what he calls a “rough edge”, in the form of a short comment describing what is going to happen next. So when I start the next day, I don’t have to think about what’s going to happen in the story. So far, so good. We’ll see how long I last.

For what it’s worth, my would-be novel has just passed the 25,000 word mark. Still nowhere near the 50,000 I had aimed to write by the end of last November, but it still feels like quite an achievement.

Wherever you happen to be reading it now, Jonathan published this post at: BookBoy.net