- Until recently, RE de Leon was an Assistant Professor of Development Communication at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. He has since resigned to pursue new creative directions and is now a freelance writer based in Agoo, La Union. He can be reached via email at alternativity@yahoo.com
National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo) is a creative writing project held annually in November in which participants attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.
Despite the event’s name, the project is now international in scope, and there are a sizeable number of participants from the Philippines. Last time I checked, NaNoWrimo participants – “PinoyWrimos” – have collectively written more than any other country in Asia. (Check out the official PinoyWrimos website by clicking on this link.)
This is my second year doing NaNoWriMo. I’m using it as a means of encouraging myself to force out as many words of the novel as I can.
Who knows, I might just reach my original intent of finishing the Novel this year, despite the fact that I’ve also decided to use NaNoWriMo ‘09 as a chance to start rewriting the novel from the very first word of the first chapter.
Anyway, each country participating in NaNoWriMo is assigned a coordinator to encourage participants along as they write, and to organize activities. The Philippine country coordinator goes by the handle Tinamats, and this year, she asked me to write one of the weekly pep talks for NaNoWriMo participants.
Long story short, here’s a slightly revised copy of the Pep Talk, which came out for PinoyWrimos today.
If you’re a writer, I hope it’ll be useful for you whether or not you’re participating in NaNoWriMo.
[The article's original title was "NaNoWriMo and The Spectre of Writer's Block"]
Hello Wrimos!
When our dear [country coordinator] Tina first asked me to come up with this week’s pep talk, I had a completely different article in mind, but I was unable to write it. I’d come up against the bane of writers everywhere. And since the best way to deal with a problem is to face it head on, I’d like to talk about it for this week’s pep talk: writer’s block.
By now, you’re a couple of days into writing your novel, and writer’s block probably feels like a cloud lingering on the horizon – if you haven’t experienced the occasional bout already.
Good news though, your NaNoWriMo experience is probably a good way of learning to get over writer’s block, either because the “thirty days of literary abandon” that is NaNoWriMo is specifically designed set your creativity free, or because the pressure to write a certain amount of words in a certain amount of time helps you develop “sustainable writing habits.”
Writer’s block may generically refer to a writer’s inability to write, but there are many causes of writer’s block, and the key to conquering it is to understand the cause behind your particular case.
Here are 5 common types of writer’s block, and the ways your NaNoWriMo 2009 experience can help you to overcome them.
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