National Novel Writing Month Goal Fulfilled, What's Yours? - By N.L. Belardes

Recently I was in Los Angeles piecing together part of a story on the writers strike. I went on a weekend, and little did I know, writers only picket on weekdays.

I did find that some hang out at the 18th Street Coffeehouse in Santa Monica (See video of ABC23 in Santa Monica). I looked for some there, but only found writers who weren't part of any union, including one writer whose work had sown on Bravo.

So I worked on another story, this on writers who dabble in providing content Los Angeles-based blog website, www.thenervousbreakdown.com. The writers who blog on the site are actually from all over the world.

I’m hoping to have that story done by the end of the week. The premise of the article? It’s about successful and inspiring writers who aren’t part of any writers’ guild or union, but who have a sense of community and vision for themselves as individuals and as a group.

Inspired by my discussion with members of some of TNB writers—Los Angeles Times Best Selling Author Brad Listi, Spoken Word Performer Rich Ferguson, and comedic writer turned serious, Lenore Zion—I decided to make good use of some time off over the Thanksgiving holiday doing what else? Writing. Although I needed to spend time with family, and did by cooking a Thanksgiving meal, and by going to local sporting events, I also felt the need to churn out a mad amount of prose.

November, as many people don’t know, is National Novel Writing Month. There’s a website called, www.nanowrimo.org, which is a sort of MySpace for novelists, a social networking site where you can monitor your own writing output for the month. The website’s goal is a jumbled mass of 50,000 words. It's not about perfect punctuation and perfectly clear sentences. It's about creating a mass of clay-like words that can be sculpted into something beautiful. I’m guessing that’s about a 170 page novel. Of course I started late, on November 17, so I was pretty far behind. Happily, my personal goal was never 50,000 words, but rather to finish a book idea I had floating in my head (Check out my NaNoWriMo profile).

A lot of coffee and two very bloodshot eyes later, I finished a rough draft of 37,000 words about in six days time. Editing will take a month at least, realistically, longer.

I’ve always thought that if I can churn out words, anyone can. Think of all the words people type in chat rooms, myspace and in blogs. What people don’t realize is they’re writing the equivalent word count of novels all the time. I doubt if people on average are writing a book’s worth of words per week, but I bet some are, even on their cell phones.

So now that National Novel Writing Month is nearly over for me, I hope you find some goals to fulfill for yourself very soon. I encourage you to be committed and follow through in whatever you do.