NaWriJaMo Writing Success!

Nanny Flymo? Nanno Wrimo? Janny Whymo? Whatever you call it, and I can guarantee you will never call it any of those things, it means SUCCESS.

Let me explain. Marc and I entered the spirit of November's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, write a novel throughout the month of November, find out more here) last year but set ourselves a modest target of 5,000 words between us. We completed it, of course we did, and then we started to wonder about how targets helped our writing, and encouraged us to write more.

Procrastination often means putting something off until whenever you think the time is right (spoiler alert, the time will never be right), but with the stick over your head of however many words to write and the end of a set time period fast approaching, as well as team member who is relying on you to do your bit as they furiously find time to complete theirs... It really helps motivate you and get the job done.

With that in mind, and the Christmas period over, we set ourselves a task to write 5,000 words EACH in January. And we did it! That means we have written 10,000 words collectively over the month- how amazing is that?

The stick approach (as in the carrot and the stick) of having a goal to complete before a set time or risk the wrath of my team mate was something, but also there was the glorious carrot. In my case the carrot was tweeting how many words I'd achieved and how much closer I was to my goal, as well as catching up with Marc to see how he was doing. Both elements of motivation in force and with very impressive results and also some lovely plot development and new elements of the story.

And are we going to carry on in February? Actually no... there will be no goal word count this month, although we are setting ourselves some other challenges. We don't want this to get too easy - we'd write the book really quickly and then what would we podcast about? Huh?