NaNoWriMo

Ghost Writer
4 min readNov 10, 2023

I feel like I’ve seen this everywhere. It’s become like a buzz word in the writing community. Write a novel in a month. But the more I thought about it, the more I have really thought about where it comes from, where it is going, is it cotton eyed Joe? I don’t know.

Because of this I’ve never participated in this writing event even though it sounds like something I want to do for reasons I’ll get into later, but first let’s dive deep into the mystery of NaNoWriMo. (Not gonna lie for the longest time I thought it was NaNoRiMo. I have no idea, but it always sounded like Rimo for some reason)

NaNoWriMo origins

National novel writing month was started in 1999, as a challenge to write 50,000 words, which is a pretty good size for a book. The context stories are roughly:

Short stories are 1,500 ~5,000.

Novella 10,000 ~50,000

Novel 50,000- and above

The non-profit institution is doing a good thing promoting writing for the common folks, us plebeians, and I love that. On their website you can sign up and gain access to their free material and join their community.

Photo by Trey Gibson on Unsplash

So, the challenge is calling for a novel and a whole novel in the span of one month, only 4 weeks, 30 days to write a meaningful story. Maybe that’s why I haven’t participated because…

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Ghost Writer
Ghost Writer

Written by Ghost Writer

Just tryin to figure out writing and here's what I've learned so far.