I'm trying to decide if I'm going to participate in the National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write a short 50,000 word novel between November 1-30. That ends up being about 1600 words a day.
That's as much writing as some of my short stories. Per day. My longest story to date is about 5000 words. 5000. Not 50,000. Now, I realize the idea is not to produce a ready-to-print novel in 30 days, but it's still a lot of work. The idea is to kick your writer's brain into gear. Even if you're writing total crap, you're writing. I do like that idea, and it fits with what so many of my professors encouraged.
But the scale of this scares me. I write short. It's a conversation I had with my Capstone prof last spring. My stories tend to be much shorter than those of my peers. Sometimes it works for the story, sometimes it doesn't. Do I really have enough material for a whole novel, even a short one? I have one story idea that could potentially be expanded, but it's not even fleshed out enough for a short story yet. It would require much more plotting and character development than I currently have in my one page Word document designated for the idea.
I have two weeks. Stay tuned to find out what I choose. (For the record, I'm leaning towards participating.)
