NaNoWriMo for a Blogger

Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo is a strategy to help novel writers record 50,000 words during the month of November. But have you heard of doing NaNoWriMo for a blogger?

For the authors, there are online communities, local meetups, and different types of support groups for writers to encourage each other.

I’m not working on a book, but I did have a dozen or so blog posts sitting in draft mode with only basic outlines. I knew I needed to send out a few emails. I had product descriptions for my Etsy shop to write.

So I modified the number – I picked 20,000 instead of 50,000 – and focused on writing every day. I wrote on 28 days out of 30.

And it worked! I got 14 posts out of “draft jail” and created 17 new posts as well. That’s one post for every day in November!

I sent out my newsletters and added to my Etsy shop.

And over the month of November, including this post, I wrote 20,000 words! I published 31 posts – and most of those needed to have photos and videos edited as well. Phew… That was a lot of work!

Some of those things I would have done anyway of course, but I definitely had a larger content output with this strategy. Who knows how long some of those post outlines would have sat in my draft folder.

I can see that someone shooting for the 50,000 words in a month would need a lot of time to work on it, and possibly the support of family. Especially if this is a goal outside of anything they do for their regular job.

And don’t forget the Thanksgiving holiday – planning, cooking and travel may knock out time you had hoped to write.

The next time I do some type of writing goal, I think I’ll do it by a timer method instead. Maybe 20 minutes at a time. Or maybe try two 15 minute sessions in a day.

I found that fixating on a daily number of words made me get a bit “ramble-y” sometimes. A time limit might help me stay focused while allowing me to be succinct.

But, it was definitely rewarding to watch that word total go up, so I would probably still track that even if I had a time goal vs. a word count goal.

So what do you think – is this something you would try for your own blogging or business? What would you focus on?

And if you have any suggestions for getting some writing done when you just don’t feel like it, please share those as well!