If you’re an aspiring novelist and just don’t know where to start, how about just writing? NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a yearly contest where participants simply write during the entire month of November. The object of the yearly contest is about getting your novel done, not worrying about editing. At least not up front. Basically, just do it. Get 50,000 words written by month’s end. You can sign up until the very last second, on the last day of November. There’s no fee, either, but you can contribute.

Since the contest started in 1999, the number of partipants has grown from the initial 21 (6 winners) to 59,000 in 2005 (9,769 winners). Some winners have had their novels published. If you’d rather interview a participant, there’s a media kit available.

I haven’t participated yet because I keep being side tracked when November comes around. However, my own experience is that my best fiction is written in Jan-Mar, in the dead of depressing winter, when I’m at my most reflective. In that period in 2002, at the unwitting beginning of my freelance writing career, I started 100 short stories and novellas/ novelettes, completing several using the NaNoWriMo techniques (or at least my variation). That includes 3 novelettes that are amongst my best speculative fiction writing.

My basic method was to come up with a story premise, create a timelime of major events, then just start writing whatever section came to mind. This isn’t exact, but I think I wrote two 10,000-words stories and one 30,000 word story in 5 weeks. I added updates to sections later, over a couple of months, as well as applied several edits. So NaNoWriMo methodology is doable.

I have finished the “penultimate” versions of most of my completed stories of winter 2002 (about 30-40 shorts), but I have not submitted them to an agent or editor. That’s the next step - gaining confidence. Besides that, though, I’ve learned to spark creativity, set a daily writing quota, and build an active imagination. Waking Hour and Next Stop, Phoenix St, are couple of examples of my speculative fiction generated from my “productive period” of Jan-Mar 2002. The only reason I stopped was that from Mar-Jul 2002, I was working on a non-fiction book. I’ve always found it difficult to work on fiction and non-fiction simultaneously. And since I now write full time as a professional blogger for several clients, I’ve done very little ficiton since 2002.