It's almost November, and you may not realize that November is National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). I'm telling you this because it was last year's NaNoWriMo that really sparked the idea for 30GO30, and I thought this would be a perfect time to tell the story.
Writers write.
That's the basic idea behind NaNoWriMo. Aspiring novelists spend 30 days just writing, shooting for a 50,000-word goal. It's all about overcoming perfectionism and dreams of the Great American Novel and just getting words on paper. It's kind of like your first marathon – you don't have to qualify for Boston, just getting through 26.2 miles is an accomplishment.
I am not a novelist.
Non-fiction and I have learned to exist in relative peace, and that's as far as I'm willing to push it for now. Some of my friends are a bit more adventurous, though, and as a couple of them were participating in NaNoWriMo last year, I decided to show my moral support.
I found what I thought was a novel way (pun intended) to do that. I had been meaning to write a certain e-book for my company blog (my other company) for a while, and it just kept getting put off. So, I committed to spending one hour/day for 30 days working on writing. I didn't think I'd finish, but I just wanted to make progress.
The results amazed me.
I don't use that word lightly. I've learned to be realistic with expectations of my own productivity. When I started the month, I was committed to putting the time in, but I knew that even my roughly 30-page e-book was going to require a lot of research, layout, and editing. I had to install and test almost 20 different web-based tools, for example.
November had its way with me a bit. Between Thanksgiving and a week-long conference, I completed about 21 of the 30 hours. Here's the amazing bit, though. At the end of those 21 hours, I was done – research, writing, layout, all of it. Plus, even for my self-critical nature, it was good. I felt like I had actually accomplished something.
The secret was focus.
That was it. For an hour at a time, I shut off the TV, email, Twitter, Facebook, and I just focused on the task, and it made an incredible difference. It made such a difference that I started thinking about how to apply this idea to just about everything in my life. I eventually settled on 30-minute chunks as being a bit more realistic, but that was essentially the start of 30GO30.
To you real authors, good luck!
If you're participating in NaNoWriMo this year, best of luck! You know what, you don't need luck. You just have to do it – sit down and put words on paper. They don't have to be perfect. Hell, they don't even have to make sense, at least not every day. Just write. Along the way, you'll figure it out.