Writing is often envisioned as a solitary pursuit. But it doesn’t have to be. It can be as social as getting together with other writers in a library or coffee shop, laptops out, writing side by side and discussing each other’s wins in real time. It can be as social as tracking your daily progress on a Trackbear Leaderboard, watching your line graph grow alongside everyone else’s in your group.
Some of us NWPA50K! organizers never started writing seriously until we had the opportunity to do it with others as a group. Others of us were writers first and joined a group with reservation at first, but have since never looked back.
Writing is also seen as immensely time-consuming. If you don’t have hours each day to devote to your craft, why bother? But that, too, does not have to be the case. The original 50,000-word-novel-in-a-month challenge started by the now-defunct NaNoWriMo.org began with the premise that everyone can be a writer, and we only need one thing – a deadline. With a deadline in place, even the busiest writers (e.g. parents, grad students, people with full-time jobs, or some combination of the above) can find little pockets of time throughout their day to make magic happen.
The NWPA50K! organizers have all benefited from both the social and deadline aspects of the novel a month challenge at one time or another and want to provide that community motivation to other writers and writers-to-be in the Erie area and beyond. We have planned a variety of in-person and online events throughout late October and November, as well as several online spaces to connect to other writers and give and receive moral support as we undertake our personal writing challenges.
And what if you don’t want to write a novel? Make the challenge work for you! Write your memoir! Or that poetry anthology you’ve been dreaming about! Challenge yourself to finish that novel you started last year. Need to revise? Commit to an hourly goal instead. We’re here to support all writers committing to all challenges.
Writing doesn’t have to be solitary, and it doesn’t have to be a full time job. We hope that you will join our community challenge this month. If it sounds interesting to you, use this form to sign up for the NWPA50K! challenge. We will send you invitations to this year’s events, weekly motivation if you request them, and absolutely no spam, ever. We promise.