As a long time NaNoWriMo participant, I thought it would be interesting to write this July’s Camp NaNoWriMo project in Japanese! If you are interested in joining a writing group for this, please go to the NaNoWriMo forums and respond to this thread. Like WaniKani, you need an account for NaNoWriMo and their forums.
What’s NaNoWriMo?
National Novel Writing Month has been held every November since 1999, where participants pledge to churn out a 50,000 word novel. It’s a fun way to get out a terrible first draft about that idea you’ve always had. I’ve been doing it for over a decade and it’s hard to imagine a fall without raking, Thanksgiving and plot holes.
What’s Camp NaNoWriMo?
Camp NaNoWriMo is a more flexible spin-off that is run every April and July where authors can pledge to write other things, like screenplays, short stories or haiku. Word, time or length goals are up to the author. They used to have ‘cabins’ which had a twitter-like interface for a small group of writers, but have now switched to ‘writer groups’ that do basically the same thing.
When?
It starts July 1st, 2021, and goes the whole month. But you can start late and set your goal accordingly.
How do goals work?
Goals for Novermber NaNoWriMo are 50,000 words, but Camp lets you set the goal yourself and treat them as whatever you like: lines, minutes, pages or kana. It looks like word processors will give you a kana count instead of a word count if you are typing in Japanese. I am planning on using my goal to change my sentence-a-day practice into a grammatically questionable story of some kind.
What’s the point?
Besides writing practice? If this goes well, and there is interest in sharing the results, I could see some WK-based graded-readers, depending on the abilities of the participants and getting help editing. My grammar is theoretically at Genki 1, but I’m sure I’m generating nonsense a fair amount of the time, despite what Google translate says.