If you’re not living under a rock, or even if you are but have done creative writing in the last 25 years, you’ve probably heard of NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month or National Novel Writing in a Month.

It was created in 1999 with approximately 20 participants as a writing marathon to complete a first draft of a 50,000-word novel in a month. You didn’t have to polish it; you just had to finish writing 50K words. Over the years, people tweaked the rules to fit their needs:

• The 50K gave way to personal choice in length of writing goal, with some going longer, some going shorter;
• The “novel” gave way to novels, non-fiction books, plays, poems, blogs, cookbooks — literally anything with words and a wordcount;
• The “write every day” gave way to focusing on just the wordcount;
• The “share your work” online gave way to share your wordcount, talk about your work-in-progress, connect with other authors online, join mini-writing groups to motivate you, etc.; and,
• The “month of November” gave way to “mostly November”, with some variation by users.

About the only thing consistent throughout was that it was a sprint/marathon for one month, with a focus on word counts.… Read the rest