November 1 marks the first day ofNational Novel Writing Month . It ’s a fantastic event where regular people are encouraged to indite a 50,000 - word novel in 30 days .
If you always wished you could find the time to write a novel , possibly November is the right month to lastly make that dream a reality .
to promote Macworld readers to unlock their creativity , we ’ve put out several article on topics related to NaNoWriMo . We ’ve got articles from severalMacworldcontributors who have participated in the effect and met the 50,000 - word finish several times . In “ Advice from a noveling veteran , ” Nathan Alderman give some sensible tips about how to make it to 50,000 lyric . ( One of his suggestions — blogging your novel — seems somewhat wild . But the fact is , reading Nathan ’s progress was an inspiration to me , and knowing that a few people were reading mine as I write it was a great spur to keep me writing . )
Our own Dan Moren contributes “ Surviving 30 days of noveling , ” his own pep talk about how he ’s bring off to write several novels during Novembers past , include his entrance money that he ’s written entire novels using an honest-to-goodness copy of AppleWorks .
Last year we covered NaNoWriMo in this edition of the Macworld Podcast . Give it a listen if you ’re curious .
As for me , I ’ve completed NaNoWrimo the preceding five years , the result of which is a monumental 160,000 - word novel that will probably demand to be separate in two , a 100,000 - word sci - fi novel I call for to blue-pencil , and one-half of a third novel which I trust to make out this year . Will any of them ever be put out , at least in a traditional fashion ? I think that ’s actually beside the item . The personal skill , the thing that I can cross off my life history list as if I had climbed a magniloquent mountain , is havingwrittena novel . And I would never have done that without the branch line that National Novel Writing Month give to me .
As Dan and Nathan both signal out , you do n’t ask to use fancy dick in ordination to compose a novel . Dan used AppleWorks ; his mom used TextEdit . Back in the day , I used to use the construct - in school text editor in Eudora — lecture about no features!—to write innumerable stories and article . But that does n’t mean that your Mac ca n’t be a great help in planning your novelistic attack , and in the past few years we ’ve seen a real flowering of new originative tools for Mac users .
My first year of NaNoWriMo was spent inside BBEdit , still my textbook editor of choice for most tasks — it ’s where I ’m writing this very entry , in fact . But I plot my novel itself in OmniOutliner . The 2d year , I adopted Scrivener , which combines a solid text editor in chief with a bunch of outlining and organizational feature of speech , not to mention a progress - report function that made certain I met my deadline and made it to 50,000 words in sentence . I ’ve been using it ever since .
There are pile of other great Mac writing tools out there , though . We just review StoryMill , for example . And of course there are muckle of iPad apps for writers , too . Too many to count .
Let’s do this together
And if you determine to take the plunge and require livelihood , we can offer that too . Post a note in the ribbon attached to this tarradiddle . Add me as a buddy onmy NaNoWriMo user varlet .
NaNoWriMo is a fantastic way of life to harness your originative energy and do something you never thought you ’d do . I ’ve complete NaNoWriMo five times and I highly recommend it . come up and link us in 30 mean solar day of literary abandon .
