This year is the first year I will be participating in NaNoWriMo, and I thought it would be an interesting experience to blog about. So, here is my first entry!

For those of you who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it’s National Novel Writing Month, which happens to be November. To be part of it, you simply visit the website, sign up, and do your best to write a 50,000, 175-page novel in just a month.

Sound crazy? you bet your ass it is! However, what you should understand about NaNoWriMo is that it isn’t about the quality of the novel you write, its the quantity. The point of NaNoWriMo is to get aspiring writers to get off their asses, stop making excuses, and finally get that lingering story idea out on paper!

So, what do you get if you succeed? Well, there’s no prize for NaNoWriMo except for the satisfaction of having completed such a task and, of course, 50,000 or so words of your writing that you can then edit and add on to as you please.

Now, this is my first time participating in it so I don’t know what it’s like going through all of this, but that’s the point of this blog; to share the experience through the eyes of a first-timer.

First of all, the NaNoWriMo website is great because it has a lot of different groups you can join. They have groups for each area of America, and you can just join the one for the area you live in and chat with people near you who are participating, schedule meet-ups, brainstorming sessions, or support meetings, and just generally chat and give encouragement and ideas. It seems to be a very supportive community, which I love.

As for today…well, I’m known for coming up with novel ideas and never finishing them, so starting was tricky for me. For the past few weeks i’ve been going through all of the novel ideas I’ve had over the years and thinking ‘which one shall I choose to write for NaNoWriMo?’ and you know what? I didn’t choose a single damn one of them.

I woke up this morning with a fresh idea in my head. I still hadn’t decided on what to write, so I figured I’d go with it. I’ve done the math and I would have to write around 1600-1700 words a day to make 50,000 by November 30th, so I decided to shoot for about 2000 words a day. I do work full-time five days a week, plus I’m having a weekend house party this month, so I wanted to give myself some breathing room so I wouldn’t feel guilty about skipping a day or two of writing or not having time to squeeze out enough words on a given day; I want to take the time to dedicate to NaNoWriMo, but I don’t want to lose sleep over it or anything like that.

So I opened up Microsoft Word, saved the blank document, and decided to begin.

Now, any writer will tell you that a clean sheet of paper or a blank computer screen can be one of the scariest things a writer has to face; one never really does know where to begin right off the bat. One of the first things I learned when I decided to get serious about writing is that you have to pull a reader in, and that starts on the first page, so it’s very intimidating.

I’ll show you how I eventually decided to start my story:

I have a bad feeling about this.

Meredith couldn’t shake that thought from her head as she looked up the dark staircase. It was dark and seemed almost endless, and it probably would have scared just about anybody, but Meredith was never one to be scared, which is why the thought seemed so out-of-place to her.

She was seriously beginning to regret taking this job in the first place.

I was rather proud of myself when I sat back and read this introduction. This is something that could certainly pull a reader in. Where is this staircase? Where does it lead? Are Meredith’s feelings of apprehension founded, or is she just overreacting? And what job is she doing that is forcing her to encounter these stairs?

That is the kind of thinking, in my opinion anyway, that you want your reader to experience; you want to give them a reason to want to read more.

Anyway, I just continued after that, stopping briefly to come up with a name or think an idea through (which is a really bad habit for NaNoWriMo that I KNOW I’m going to struggle with the entire time), and after about 3-4 hours, I stopped at 2,355 words, and only did so because I had errands I really had to go and run.

One of the best pieces of advice i’ve heard about NaNoWriMo is to start off early writing as much as you possibly can, because having that extra padding in the beginning of the month can make things a lot easier. So, I’m off to try and write more! As I have time, I will continue to blog about the trials and tribulations of trying to write a novel in only a month’s time.

Now, I’m off to craft what is above that spooky staircase!