- Anna Maria Junus
NaNoWriMo: The Magic Word Sprint
Oh my gosh! Yes, I know that phrase is totally lame. But I avoid swearing even if it is for joy.
I've discovered the Magic Word Sprint! Now, I suppose I didn't need Nanowrimo to do it, but Nano made it magic. For those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's an international event where writers of all shapes and sizes gather together, alone at their computers and write 50,000 words of a brand new novel in a month. They eat chocolate and potato chips, drink bathtub coffee (because bathtub gin would make them too intoxicated to write), and pretend that they don't have kids or spouses.
Nano has created quite the event, with badges, certificates, forums, groups, magic wands, sing alongs, and the ability to travel through time.
Okay, maybe I made some of that up. But some of it is there.
Of course there will be those who start and sputter out (I've done that a few times). And there's always writers who like to talk about writing, and write on forums about writing, but never actually write. And there are those who use Nano but don't follow any of the rules. Those rebels do things like work on already existing books, and count their blog, Facebook, and forum posts as words. And then there's people like me who don't have time to hang out in forums waxing poetic about the trials of getting word counts in and the difficulties of convincing families that cereal is dinner. Instead we concentrate on getting those words in.
And that's where the Magic Word Sprint comes in. Nano has an alarm that you can set (yes, you have it on your computer and your phone too but that's not the point), and in that amount of time you focus completely on your novel and just write.
You would think a writer wouldn't need a clock to keep them on task, because writers are naturally driven and inspired and have fairy dust to sprinkle on themselves whenever they need it, but if they're anything like me, I have a tendency to get distracted by stuff like - you know stuff. But if I have a clock ticking away, the competitor comes out and I want to see just how many coherent words I can write. So I discovered that a fifteen minute sprint consistently yielded about 400 words. A 20 minute sprint gave me about 700, and a 30 minute got me close to a thousand. Eureka! Two or three or four sprints and I'm at my word count for the day. Gone when it would take me all gosh darn day to get that word count in. Now it's feasible in an hour or an hour and a half. It doesn't get better than that. So I don't have a wand made from a unicorns mane and a phoenix feather. And I can't wiggle my nose, twitch my ears, or find a comfortable seat on my broom.
But I have the Magic Word Sprint.
