As a creative writing major and aspiring novelist, I try to participate in National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, every November. The goal is to write 50,000 words, a first draft of a novel, in 30 days. That’s about 1,667 words per day if you’re consistent like that (I’m not).
Any college student will tell you that November is a terrible time to write a book -- but that doesn’t keep us from trying to juggle mid-semester workloads and a writing challenge. NaNoWriMo has become, for me personally, an exercise in which I hope to write every day.
My word count goal comes after, and the idea of a cohesive novel is even less important to me. As a writer who is desperately afraid of losing all discipline and momentum after graduation, I’ve had to promise myself that I could change my novel idea literally every day of November, if it gets me to write every day.
I’m not the only writer to struggle with this -- Zach Valenti knows the pain. Valenti is mostly known for his acting and producing for Wolf 359, a fairly popular sci-fi audio drama set in deep space. This October, he birthed a new idea, a new goal.
With #WriScrivember, your aim here is not to create a novel, but a script, probably for an audio drama, but Valenti doesn’t seem too firm on this. Like me, he’s a fan of anything that will get you writing -- that’s the hard part, isn’t it?
There doesn’t seem to be an official word or page count goal, and because an audio drama is like a TV show in the way that it can be broken up into individual segments and called complete fairly quickly, or stretch on into a full season, usually ranging anywhere from 8 to 30 or so episodes of varying lengths. Most audio dramas I follow have episodes lengths ranging from 15 to 45 minutes.
So really, much like my modified NaNoWriMo system, the real goal of #WriScrivember is to sit down and write the thing you want to see in the world, and do a little bit every day.
Personally, I’m going to spend November exploring a medium I haven’t written for before while fleshing out a few of my concepts. I hope to figure out which one I either prefer more or can make good radio of, because I want to have at least 5 or 6 episodes written and ready for voice casting by January 1st.
People are made of the stories they hear and tell, and I can’t wait to put mine out into the world.