write with others!

Last night I went to the local Barnes & Noble to meet up with a group of local writers here in Charleston, South Carolina. It’s November, and this month as is every November is NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to complete 50,000 words in a single month – a difficult challenge!

I successfully completed NaNoWriMo a few years ago, but this year, as I was on vacation for the first week of November, I decided not to go for it again. Regardless, I’m always up for meeting other writers and sharing ideas and motivation, so I dropped by the book store for a NaNoWriMo Write-In.

It was a lot of fun to meet others interested in writing, and to pump each other up to meet difficult writing goals. We used the “Box of Doom”, a tool that gives each writer a random plot element and a random number of words to write, and then challenges the group of writers to meet their individual goals. I wound up with the challenge of writing 2100 words in 30 minutes that I did not complete successfully, though I still received “NaNoWriMo credit” for failing the task (there’s an achievement, for lack of a better term, for completing the task, and also an achievement for failing it).

While there turned out to be much more talking than writing during our Write-In, I still recommend getting together with local writers to talk about writing! It’s extremely motivating to talk about writing and to critique the writing of others, not to mention very helpful for all of those involved who are interested in improving upon their craft.