5 Reasons to Try out NaBloPoMo

I’ve done NaBloPoMo twice before. And while sure, I failed the second time I tried, I succeeded the first time with results that were roughly 507 times better than what I expected. This year, however, I’m disappointed by how few other people are trying it out. Sure, I know two or three bloggers at the moment who will be attempting this, but most of the others I know of are either doing NaNoWriMo or nothing at all.

The good news is: depending on the time zone you live in, there’s still time to participate, and here are five reasons why:

1) Because blogging about your NaNoWriMo progress is boring.

I’m going to be honest, I’d don’t give a hoot about how many words you wrote today, (unless you’re George R. R. Martin), and I don’t really care about any excerpts from your novel you post because the scientific study of probability tells me that they’ll be horrible. It’s not your fault; it’s just that you’re supposed to be writing 1,667 words a day in a project where editing your work is actively discouraged. Not to mention, the first draft of any novel is almost universally awful, no matter how talented you are or how quickly you write it.

When bloggers spend a month on NaNoWriMo, they usually neglect their blogs, and the quality and quantity of their posts always suffers. And no one wants that. Well, no one except that one blogger rival you have, who’s currently looking at your lack of posts and thinking, “Aha! S/he’s not writing any blog posts. Now my blog will reign supreme!”

Do you really want your enemy to laugh evilly as your stats decline? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

2) You might actually succeed.

It’s tough to explain how I felt at the end of last years NaBloPoMo, but I’m going to try it anyway: it felt great.

(Okay, that was easier than expected.)

Seriously, nothing beats that feeling you get when you succeed at something like this; you feel accomplished, proud, and confident in your blogging skills. You feel like a superhero: a sleep-deprived superhero who doesn’t get outside much. It’s great.

3) You will gain followers, no matter how bad your posts are.

Even if you don’t get Freshly Pressed, (like I totally did, no biggie) you will gain views, followers, and best of all, commenters. There’s nothing better than having a reader who consistently comments on your blog. Well, maybe there is, but I haven’t found it yet.

Not to mention, you could write about just about any topic, and chances are you’ll find like-minded people out there who are interesting in what you say, assuming you post consistently on the topic. You could be writing about paint dry, and chances are they’ll be at least one person out there who finds that to be a very interesting subject, and BAM! You’ve gained a commenter.

4) You will undoubtedly experience a huge increase in creativity.

Forcing yourself to write may be hard at first, but if you keep at it you’ll find all those creative juices flowing. It’s like unclogging a drain. Once you wash out all the crap, the water starts flowing.

(In this metaphor, the crap is “writer’s blog” and the water is “inspiration.” I’m not sure if it works or not.)

5) Even if you fail, you’ll still get something out of it.

The same is true for NaNoWriMo. Even if you’re like me, and come down with the flu halfway through the month, you’ll still have at least written a couple posts, posts you wouldn’t have written had you never tried to begin with. And that’s something to be proud of.