
November is, for many of us, a month of deadlines, pre-final anxiety and grading, and the inevitable incursion of the holidays. It is also an incredibly popular month for writing sprints and challenges, which thoroughly embrace the spirit of “fail faster” as a way to try something new or get further in a stalled project. The spirit of November is best expressed through NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, an event that brings together a huge community of writers telling stories. The same concept has been embraced by a number of other groups, and November is a great time to find inspiration from peers across social media who are engaged in one type of writing sprint or another. A few of my favorites (several of which I am participating in, either whole or half-heartedly) include AcWriMo, DigiWriMo, and NaNoGenMo:
- AcWriMo, or Academic Writing Month, (also check the hashtags #AcaDoWriMo and #AcaWriMo) is particularly aimed at PhD students or those working on books or chapters. It’s much more flexible than NaNoWriMo (a month in which completion of a novel is judged on the writing of 50,000 words, period) in that it encouraged public goal-setting and reasonable commitment based on the project and type of writing. For instance, I’ve declared it the month in which a 10,000 word book section springs to life from months of planning and outlining. Check back in a few weeks and we’ll see how that went! George wrote about last year’s AcWriMo here.
- DigiWriMo, or Digital Writing Month, is a concept from the team behind Hybrid Pedagogy. DigiWriMo is focused not so much on academic writing as writing for digital media. This can be interpreted broadly, as the team pointed out in their “10 Reasons You Should Do Digital Writing Month,” and like NaNoWriMo involves aiming to write 50,000 words in a month. Digital writing by this definition can range from tweets to blog posts and beyond to expressive hypertexts, comics, games, or other experimental works. If you’ve been thinking of diving in more to social media or online discourse, the community hashtag can be a good place to start.
- NaNoGenMo, or National Novel Generation Month, may sound like a parody of NaNoWriMo at first: write code that generates a novel of 50,000+ words. However, it’s a great way to engage in coding and try something new: creator Darius Kazemi noted that a novel could be defined however you want, including “50,000 repetitions of the word ‘meow’”, a concept taken literally in this Meow edition of Moby Dick. Exploring the code and resources from the community offers some very cool models of playing with language and procedural generation.
Are you participating in a November writing sprint? Share your experiences and resources in the comments!
[CC BY 2.0 Photo by Flickr User MPClemens]