With NaNoWriMo 2015 approaching fast, many people who love creative writing feel pressured to write a novel in November. But we don't need to write a novel to become writers. In fact, many acclaimed writers are well known for their short narratives. A good example of how true this is is Alice Munro, a Canadian short-story writer, who has won several literary awards. Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 for her work as a "
master of the contemporary short story."
So, if we don't feel like writing a novel, but we still want to spend November writing, are there any interesting alternatives available?
The answer is "Yes!" And here are a few of them:
The Notebook Project
One notebook, cover to cover, in 30 days
What is "The Notebook Project" (or NoBoPro for short)? It's a month long challenge to entirely fill one notebook from cover to cover in November. A NaNoWriMo alternative, the notebook project asks its participants to pick a notebook (any size, any shape) and fill it up in 30 days. You can write poetry, prose, essays, short stories, fragments, haikus, screenplays, one liners - whatever your heart desires! But by the end of the month, every page had better be filled.
Link to NoBoPro page
National Blog Posting Month
30 Days, 30 Posts
"If 50,000 words seem like 49,000 too many or you’re more interested in blogging than writing a book, NaBloPoMo — National Blog Posting Month — might be your speed: a challenge to post once every day for the entire month of November. No theme, no word count, no rules; just you, your blog, and 30 new posts." -
Michelle W.
Link to NaBloPoMo community at BlogHer
Academic Writing Month
30 days, all forms of academic writing
Every year participants abide by these 6 rules:
- You have to decide on a goal where you count either words, hours or projects.
- You declare your goal by signing up on the ‘Writing Accountability Spreadsheet’
- You then draft your approach to the month, making sure you have done enough preparation to write a lot.
- You discuss your progress on social media like Twitter and Facebook, using the hashtag #AcWriMo.
- You have to work really hard and not get distracted.
- And at the end you must publicly declare your results on the spreadsheet or on social media.
Link to Academic Writing Month on Wikipedia
DigiWriMo
going digital for 30 days
"Digital writing can be anything. It can be a blog post, an e-mail, a text message. It can be a tweet, or a Facebook update, or a conversation on Tumblr. It can be comments on blog posts, responses to news articles, book reviews shared on GoodReads, or fan fiction. It can also look a lot more traditional: poems posted on the web, self-published novels on Amazon and iBooks, or short stories uploaded to an online ‘zine."
In some ways, Digital Writing Month (or DigiWriMo) is like taking The Notebook Project to the Internet.
Link to DigitalWritingMonth.com
Become a NaNo Rebel
30 days of rebellion
NaNoWriMo organizers love rebels so much that they even created a whole forum devoted to them, and their questions - the most common of them being: "Am I a rebel?"
Things that can turn any WriMo into a NaNo Rebel include:
- writing a series of unrelated essays/short stories/vignettes;
- writing a memoir, a biography, a guide to Europe (or to anywhere else), creative non-fiction, and any kind of non-fiction;
- writing a script;
- writing a video game;
- drawing a graphic novel;
- composing music for 30 days;
- creating 50 pictures, instead of writing 50K words of fiction.
Another common question is: "Can NaNo Rebels validate their word count?"
And the answer is: No one will prevent NaNo Rebels from validating their word count, or, as Heather Dudley, Lead Forums Moderator at NaNoWriMo.org, puts it: "Some rebels validate, others don't. We don't check, and we don't care!", adding that "This is a self-challenge. The REAL prize of NaNoWriMo is the accomplishment, and the big new manuscript you have at the end. Everything beyond that is icing on the cake." Basically, the organization leaves the decision to validate, or not, to each NaNoWriMo participant.
Link to NaNo Rebels forum
There are probably a few other writing projects out there, taking place in November. So one thing has become clear: with so many writing projects going on there isn't any excuse for us not to spend November writing. :)
