Why We Don’t Do NaNoWriMo

As I’m sure you know, November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). There’s a whole website about it, so I won’t go into the details here. The idea is to focus on writing for one month, essentially providing an excuse to be selfish with your time.

We find though, that as a married writing team, we don’t need permission to focus on our craft. When we write we don’t have to tune out our significant other. Writing is what we do together most evenings anyway. There’s not really a way, short of taking extended vacations, for us to focus on writing more than we already do.

One aspect of NaNoWriMo that many people seem to like is the way it lets you track your progress. It’s set up to appeal to one’s vanity and competitive nature, and for many people it provides a lot of motivation. Thing is, once again, it’s something we really don’t feel the need for because our writing partnership has it built in. We’re totally vain and competitive! Plus, we have to keep each other synced up, and we each want to feel a sense of ownership in the product (and feel like we’re holding up our end) so we’re pre-motivated to keep the work flowing and share it with one another.

In a way, every month in the Skelley house is NaNoWriMo.

Do you participate in NaNoWriMo? Let us know in the comments.