A Good Excuse To Write

I'm not a huge fan of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I appreciate what it does in encouraging people to not worry about anything other than getting their ideas written down and banging it out in a relatively short time. And I definitely support anybody who uses it. What I don't care for is how people tend to think of November as a writing month, and then not thinking of any other month as a writing month.

Meeting deadlines and completing projects is awesome. It is a crucial skill for a writer. But another skill is writing every day. I've never really been interested in NaNoWriMo because I already am writing, so it seems silly to dedicate a month to something I do every day.

That said, I do enjoy a good excuse to write. I was planning a collaborative project with a fellow writer friend, and since November was right around the corner, it made sense to use NaNoWriMo as a framework for our project. Each of us will work on our respective parts through November, and when we have reached our limit, we will trade off to read and edit each other's work, so that we will end up with a finished and polished piece.

If we had come up with the idea in March, we would not have waited half a year to do it now, but things lined up well, so we are taking advantage of the existing structure to focus and motivate us. And, I suppose, that is what NaNoWriMo does best: give you a good excuse to write.