Camp NaNo July 2019

The second camp of the NaNoWriMo year is coming up soon, and my preparations are underway.

For those who haven’t heard of it, NaNoWriMo is an exhilarating, fun approach to creative writing, with a challenge to achieve the seemingly impossible task of writing a 50,000 word novel in just one month.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, a non-profit that believes in the transformational power of creativity. They provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.

You can find them here – https://nanowrimo.org/

The main event is in November every year, but they also run a much more relaxed event in April and July, where you can set your own goal instead of 50,000 words, edit a previous novel, write a screenplay, or poetry. The aim is just to continue being creative, keeping up the momentum needed to be a writer.

Camp NaNo can be found here – https://campnanowrimo.org

My project for July 2019 is to do Edit 1 of my novel Broader Horizons, which I completed the first draft for during Camp NaNo April 2017, with a total of 51,404 words. My goal is to do 45 hours of editing, tracked by minutes each day.

Word counts are a problem during the editing phase if you want to track progress because you could be removing material that doesn’t fit into the storyline anymore, either because you changed the plot, or the passage just isn’t up to the standard of work you want to produce. This would give you a negative word count and not reflect the work you have done.

You could also spend a lot of time moving sections from one place to another, to increase the tension, improve the flow of dialogue, or introduce backstory in a more appropriate place, again with no apparent progress.

Sometimes you have to juggle things around for a couple of days before reassuring yourself that you actually had it right in the first place, it worked before, and you were only making it worse. Every now and then “leave well enough alone” is the way to go.

The end goal here is to end up with a story you are happy to tell, and which you hope your readers will enjoy reading.

If you have any questions about National Novel Writing Month then send me a message in the Contact Us section of this website.