Didn't start it as early as last year, but since nobody else started a thread on it, here's 2019's NaNoWriMo thread. Copying most of the material from last year's intro post.
In case you aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo:
What is NaNoWriMo?NaNoWriMo is an informal challenge to anyone who wants to write. The idea is simple: you simply have to write 50,000 words of a story during the month of November. You don't necessarily have to finish the story, so long as you write that many words, and it doesn't matter
what the story is. This isn't going to be published anywhere without you doing it, so it can be fanfiction for all that the challenge cares.
The point is to just get words down. A lot of writers agree that this is the hard part, and you can easily get stuck trying to edit or world build. From experience, I can say that it's very true, and anyone who wants to give this a shot is strongly encouraged to not fret about the quality of your work and just focus on getting a first draft down. I did last year and hate how it turned out, but I'm still glad I did it since it puts me in a better place to try it this year.
Is this a competition?Not really. You're only challenging yourself. You can certainly compare your progress to others, but it's informal and you won't get anything but a warm, fuzzy feeling for beating someone else.
Is my writing safe?Sure. You don't have to publish anything you write, and nanowrimo.org just has a tool for inputting word counts. They have a word count utility as well, which supposedly scrambles the text so that nobody could possibly steal it, but in seriousness there's no reason to be afraid of whatever you're writing getting out in the wild without you doing it.
Can I win anything?Only personal satisfaction, which is a surprisingly good thing in my experience. Supposedly you can get some discounts on software or other sponsored goodies if you "win" by hitting 50K words, but I don't actually know how this works. I "won" last year, but didn't investigate that part.
Can't I just cheat and enter whatever I want in the word count tool then?Sure, but you're only cheating yourself in the end. The whole point is to make something of your own and prove to yourself that you can do it.
Official website:https://nanowrimo.org/Links to previous years:201820172016201520142013 2012
I actually have a solid topic this year, but fear it's a little too ambitious: a CYOA story about a dragon paladin and his cleric friend (also a dragon) who go digging in the ruins of their collapsed civilization to learn and destroy the source of the undead plaguing the world. The twist is that despite it being a CYOA, you're actually not playing the paladin or cleric and instead an outside force guiding them, which will be a late story plot twist.
I can't decide at this point if writing a CYOA for NaNoWriMo is a good idea because you can get lots of words in by rewriting scenes along different decision paths, or a terrible idea because CYOAs require a lot of planning and I'm historically bad at doing that. Time will tell.
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Topic: National Novel Writing Month 2019 (Read 6865 times)