Every year thousands of ambitious wordsmiths are crushed. I’m talking about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), of course. The biggest online writing-palooza in the world. The rules are very simple:
1. You must write 50,000 words
2. You cannot start sooner than November 1st and you must finish by November 30th.
3. You must begin a new novel. It can be a sequel, but you can’t finish a manuscript that’s been sitting on your computer for years.
The obvious question that I had, and every neophyte’s first question is, “Can I just write the word, ‘word’ over and over 50,000 times?” Copy-paste baby! Loophole!
The answer is technically yes. I don’t know anyone who’s tried it, but I can’t imagine why they would not count it.
If your answer is no, does a random word generator work? This is the grey area that trips up all writers. At what point are you just writing gibberish? At what point are you writing a master piece? We stop writing because we’re afraid of writing garbage. We make the mental shortcut of “well if I’m just going to have to delete it anyway, why bother writing?”