Writing a Novel in 30 Days

Earlier this month, I found a web site devoted to a contest where each person's goal is to write an entire novel (50K words) during the month of November (which apparently is National Novel Writing Month). I'm not a writer by any stretch of the imagination but the idea intrigued me. It piqued my interest not because I'm jonesin' to write a novel (I can't even maintain a constistent, logical thought with a few short paragraphs!) but because of what they said on their site.

Why are you doing this? What do you get out of it?
NaNoWriMo is all about the magical power of deadlines. Give someone a goal and a goal-minded community and miracles are bound to happen. Pies will be eaten at amazing rates. Alfalfa will be harvested like never before. And novels will be written in a month.

It interests me because at the beginning of the month thousands of people are establishing a goal for themselves and are setting out to reach it. Last year there were 42,000 participants and almost 6,000 reached their goal of writing a 50,000 word novel. Even though 36,000 people didn't reach their goal, kudos to them for setting a goal and at least trying to work at it.

I'm not very good at reaching goals and even worse at setting them. That's what some people like to call "lack of ambition." According to Ben Franklin's list, I'm not doing well at Resolution. I guess I figured sometime a while back that if I aim at nothing, I'll hit it every time. For a while, lack of aspiring to anything feels better than failing at something you set out to do but then you're left feeling empty after having tried and accomplished nothing. In the world of romance, Alfred Lord Tennyson put it this way: 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

So, in the spirit of this post and attempting to put some ambition back in my life, my goal for the month of November is to not write a 50,000 word novel.