Someone once said, “to write well, first you have to write badly,” and this November I have been doing just that – writing badly that is. This is my experience.

Every November a challenge is issued to aspiring writers to write 50,000 words in 30 days. National Novel Writing Month (http:www.nanowrimo.org) has become an annual pilgrimage for thousands of people all over the globe. As I write, 100,000 people have registered to take part and we are approaching a combined total of one billion words. Hopefully we will tumble over that landmark before the deadline of 30th November.

I only heard about NaNo in late October. I had a vague idea for a fantasy novel, based in my beloved Scotland, in the back of my head for several years but never had the courage or the cheek to do anything about it. Indeed the most I had ever written was 25000-word novellas as my characters always seemed to run out of steam about then.

Those at NaNo explained the idea was not to write the novel of the year, but just to write, not to re-read, re-write, edit or in any other way let the internal editor that is in all of us, interfere. Personally I had to chain her up in the basement complete with gag. She did escape a couple of times and I found myself deleting precious words from my daily count, for which I was soundly reprimanded by my writing buddies. The idea of NaNo write, as I interpreted it, was to let the creative juices flow without judgment or criticism.

The NaNo site itself is huge with an e-mail facility, a way of creating writing buddies and a radio station. Then there are the forums on every topic you could imagine: plot lines, give-away titles, useful sites, publisher details, resources, separate ones for each genre of writing and on and on. If you read every one you would never get any writing done but there are many I am hoping to explore more from December to September.

During NaNo month, in locations over the world, groups arrange to meet in libraries, internet cafes and homes for “write-ins”, mutual support and fun. Unfortunately the local group were all much, much younger than me and I did not feel comfortable joining them but on-line I found a wonderful group my own generation. Yes we wrote, but we also had fun, exchanged ideas and worries, cried and laughed, oh and generally bullied each other to the finish line, we made friendships we will carry on long after NaNo.

For the most part the exercise worked! I started with only a vague idea and some characters, no storyline and not much else really except a familiarity with the genre from my reading and a great love and some little knowledge of my country and its history. Much of the time it was an uphill struggle, like pushing a boulder uphill, sweating blood, pulling teeth and hair, whatever you can identify with. But every day I set aside time first thing in the morning to write a thousand words, then a thousand more. I confess that towards the end it was down to write one hundred words, then one hundred more.

What has emerged is largely rubbish and will be discarded; it isn’t even good enough for a first draft. But along the way each of my characters has developed personalities, with distinct forms of speech, mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. The landscape in which they live has become real and I have a coherent story line that I can now work with.

Would I do it again? Probably, largely to experience the camaraderie that makes this site alive. Next year though, I mean to have a working storyline that I can deviate from!