Camp NaNo - The Time To Practice Writing

We've hit July! And for many people that means the start of summer holidays, bright weather, beach days and relaxing. That's especially needed after the year we've had, I think! But, for some of us July also means getting ready to spend a ridiculous amount of time writing. As you may have gathered from the title, Camp Nano is here in July.

This post should have gone up last week, however, due to some personal circumstances I was away from my laptop, and working via phone which wasn't allowing me to upload this. Also I hadn't synced this draft to my phone yet which just goes to show that you should back up multiple times in multiple places!

So, what is NaNo?

NaNo is short for NaNoWriMo which is short for National Novel Writing Month. This is held in November and is a time in which people dedicate themselves to writing 50,000 words in a single month. 30 days.

That works out at about 1,667 words a day, or around 12k words a week. Which is a lot of words to write. You may be thinking at this point, why would anyone do that to themselves?

For me, it's not necessarily about making it to 50k words in the month, but more to get into the habit of writing and simply get something down on the page. I have to confront my fear of that blank document and I know that when I look back on November 30th that I will have something written. It could be 100 words or 1000, but the main thing is that I'm however-many-words further forward than I was at the start of the month. This is what works for me and I love it.

So, not only do we have NaNoWriMo (the 50k in November) but in April and July. Again, it lasts the whole month but this time you can set your word count goal.

So, in April I set mine at 10k and managed around 8k. This month I've set myself the smaller goal of 5k for poetry. I may not write 5k words of poetry in the month, but I'm going to have something more than I had before it! And I'm going to want to write each day. Or every other day and see how close to that goal I can make it in the month.

But I don't want to write a novel?

Then don't! It's as simple as that. I did Camp NaNo in April for my draft of an ebook about Creating a Second Brain and I'm planning on spending some time editing that this month (now that I've had time away from it).

You can work on fiction, non-fiction, poetry (another of the things I'm tackling this Camp NaNo), anything that you're wanting to write this month. I'd suggest just sitting down and going for it!

Progress is progress!

I remember one year I focused on my thesis. I wanted to get the bulk of the writing part done between April and July so that I could spend the rest of my time editing and it worked really well for me. It wasn't creative but academic and I found it to be great.

Writing practice is never a bad thing. You'll spend a month throwing yourself into writing, testing out new techniques or strategies and at the end of the month you'll realise that you've learned a lot. This may be about yourself and how you work, or a text you've been analysing or a creative technique you've finally become comfortable with using. Just sit down and try writing.

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.