Becoming A Writer Seriously

Well, Jeremy Osborne has followed up on his promise to participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month exercise. But he’s gone one step farther: he has created, as an experiment, a NaNoWriMo wiki. which he will fuel — BUT which anyone else can contribute to, a group-written novel. An interesting idea, which I wish to bring to your attention.

Here’s a chance to watch the NaNoWriMo process at a comfortable distant — no obligations, other than reading the wiki from time to time, to see how the novel progresses, and perhaps checking in to the official NaNoWriMo website.

For the more industrious, you can become a contributor to the evolving novel, without committing to writing the whole thing. Just putting a big toe in the water, so to speak. Who knows, you might enjoy it enough this year to join in next year’s NaNoWriMo as a full-fledged writer. In fact, you can even sign up as a participant this year, so that you can keep up with the inner-workings of NaNoWriMo — there are some interesting benefits for doing so.

There’s an additional benefit to following Jeremy’s experiment: you will learn through direct experience how collaboration via a wiki software actually works. With that knowledge, you may come up with applications that will be helpful to you in your own writing career.

Check out Jeremy’s description of his experiment to better understand what he’s up to. You can also jump straight into his nanowiki. As I write this, on the very first day of the month, the wiki contains only information about the rules of the game and such, but by midnight, I’m sure that Jeremy will have his first installment registered at the wiki. It will be interesting to see who else joins into the exercise [actually you can make anonymous contributions, if you are shy].

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