Is It Cheating to Start Planning for NaNoWriMo Now?

by akiva on August 5, 2009

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I’m not allowed to participate in NaNoWriMo. It makes me fussier than normal and that fussiness spills out all over my long-suffering wife so she put her foot down and said, ‘Nope, no more. Forget about it.’

Well, I can’t and I think I have a method that’ll ensure that I complete the challenge without pretty much resorting to hard core drug use: Surrealist automatism. I’ll allow myself a tiny nugget of an idea: perhaps two strangers who just both happen to be taking the same path to get to the store and then write the lot of it with the monitor turned off. No checking for spelling or grammatical errors, no obsessing over sentence structure and flow, no worrying about continuity. The only goal is to type until the bell dings letting me know that I’ve written approximately 1,700 words that day.

It’s a goofy idea but it appeals to my surrealist nature. And, considering the quality of NaNoWriMo books anyway, typing one out without actually seeing it seems like par for the course.

  • I must say that shutting the monitors down, closing your eyes, and just letting your story flow from your hands was one of my favorite ways to write. I have no clue if there is science backing this up, but it felt like I had less to comprehend, possibly do to complete reduction of visual stimuli. Ironicly, I found FF and promptly dropped the technique, guess I should start doing it again. Thank you, Akiva.
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