Prisimpad: A Guide to Wattpad, Writing, and Whatever

ON WHATEVER: NaNoWriMo

If you've been around the writing community in any stages, you've probably seen someone refer to Nano AKA NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It encompasses the month of November in which the goal is to write 50K in a single month. It is both fun and hell on earth. You have no choice but to shut off your inner editor and critic. If something sounds terrible, who cares! Keep it! You can fix it later. If there's a typo, who gives a crap, just go with it. Don't stop to spell check, don't read through what you wrote, just write the novel! Now I at least run it through spell check since I usually post on Wattpad at the same time as I write my Nano's. While I don't mind there being typos I wasn't going to leave all my errors, you guys would really get to see how bad I am without spellcheck if I did, but you really are supposed to just write and forget anything and everything else.

I've done Nano for several years now. The first year was with The Reapers Daughter. I bombed and bombed hard. I managed about 30K words or so, which isn't bad, but I never got a real writing groove going for it. The book ultimately died and probably will never be revived. Then I had Guardian of Calandria. That baby just flowed out of me! While it was still rough as hell, it was some of the smoothest writing grooves I had in a long time. I managed to "win" nano with a nice buffer. The book wasn't even remotely near complete at the time Nano ended, it took me another couple of months to finish it, but I beat nano. At the time of my posting this my other nanos were: Lady of the Mysts, How We Found Us, and Awakening Kristmas. All of which I managed to win with.

So what do you get if you "win?" Well, you get a sense of pride. You wrote a full length novel (or in my case, half of one) in a single month! But they also give you codes to get some goodies like discounts off writing programs such as Scrivener. I had a code to get a free hardbound copy made, which I used on Freelander to help with my editing, through Lulu. Createspace allowed for 2 soft copies, but I didn't take that code because at the time you had to actually put the book on sale to get them. I didn't want to do that because I knew it wasn't ready to be published. Lulu allowed me to make it private so only I could order one.

There's so many codes for free and discounted goodies. I think there was a code for money off on Grammarly, which is an editing assistant program of sorts. One year Wattpad was one of the sponsors of it. I don't know who, if anyone, won the cash prize but they were offering up 2K for a winner. They never announced anything so I'm not sure if they ever actually picked a story or not. After that Wattpad started their "Just Write It" campaign.

But it is a commitment if you want a chance. If you don't commit, you won't make it.

Give it a try though. While they recommend it, you don't have to start a new story, you can be a rebel, just don't count what you wrote prior to Nov 1st. Anything within the month of November, however, is fair game! Challenge yourself! 

During April and July they also have Camp Nano which is essentially a slimmed down nano. You set your goal you want to meet. So if you only want to write 5K in a month, you can. Or you can go for 50K or more. It's your choice during Camp.