One of the more stupid things you can do in November -- besides stay in Michigan waiting for the snow to come -- it to get involved in the insanity known as NaNoWriMo, as it's known. In English, that's National Novel Writing Month.

This, well, I guess you could call it a promotion, got started a few years ago to promote amateur writing. The general idea is to sit down at your notepad or computer or whatever and write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. It's gotten to be a fairly big deal, with over ten thousand people expected to attempt the challenge this year.

Now, 50,000 words really isn't that much as far as novels go. In fact, it's mostly a warmup. Short young adult novels often go twice that, your typical supermarket doorstopper 300,000 words or more, and long, complex series can get into the millions. 50,000 words is a novella, hardly much more than a long short story, but it's a big challenge for a lot of people that think about taking this on.

Since NaNoWriMo is mostly an Internet phenomenon, you can be sure that there's a website to promote that goes into it in some detail: http://www.nanowrimo.org/. It's a busy place this time of year, and is a little sluggish, to say the least. But there is a long list of various forums, and most of them that I've looked at contain a lot of people crying about how hard it is to crank out 1,667 words per day to hit the goal of 50,000 words.

Although I am to some degree a professional writer, I also write for fun -- "compulsive writer" is the term I use. In fact, I've written a lot of fiction over the years,  and with one exception never bothered to try to sell it. Basically, my writing is intended to satisfy it's audience of me, although a few other people have occasionally seen a book now and then.

But I've done little writing the last couple years. I've made some false starts on stories but given up because they just weren't working for me, and the last one I completed  I'm not all that thrilled with. So, with November rolling around, I decided to use NaNoWriMo, amateur hour though I figured it was, as motivation to get back into gear, what with winter coming on and all.

Now, I've always been a fast writer. I probably wouldn't get the fun out of writing if I had to slog along at 1,667 words a day. Frankly, it would bore me to tears  -- I'm always interested in seeing what's going to happen next, and once I get rolling I can bat them out pretty good. In fact, once several years ago I really had the bit in my teeth when I was going over an area I had thought out pretty well, and kicked out a 32,000 word day, and 12,000 to 15,000 word days on weekends is not unheard of.

To make a long story short, five days into NaNoWriMo, I was 36,665 words into the story and rolling along pretty good. I'm just getting into the meat of the story, and would not be surprised if it wound up going 150,000 words. It wouldn't break my heart if it went more -- after all, we're getting into winter and I have to have something to do. Writing is, if nothing else, cheap.

The NaNoWriMo forums have been fun and I've tried to pass along a word of wisdom here and there. There's a lot of complaining about "I can't come up with a story idea!" There are a million stories out there, all you have to do is to tell them. What writing novels is especially useful for is exploration of the roads not taken in your life, especially when the choice to go one way or another was especially close.

I've always found it hard to write fiction about ordinary people doing ordinary things. Throw an ordinary person into an unusual, challenging situation and you have a story.

If you're crazy or bored and looking for something to do, there's still time to get in on NaNoWriMo this year, although you'll have to kick out a little better than 1667 words a day, but 2500 per day is not an impossible figure and would still get you well past 50,000 by the end of the month.

The idea, after all, is to not worry about the publishing but to learn to enjoy the writing and the creativity involved behind it. You might well have a book in you and there's only one way to find out.

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