If you’re not a writer (or if, say your mother ,or other family member, isn’t a writer like mine is) then you probably don’t know about NanoWriMo. The NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth (get it?) event that takes place in November. (If you want more info on the event check out www.nanowrimo.org, this ends the plug and lots of parentheses segments of our show… ok, really just the plug part of the show.) Even if you did know about it, you may have thought “I’m not a writer, this is a writer thing. I’m going to go draw pictures and play with colours.” Well there Jack…or, um… Jill, I submit to you (I had this awesome college professor my first year who always prefaced all his questions with “I submit to you…”, I don’t think it sees enough play in our modern times.) that writing a novel, or even a few short stories but more on that in a minute, is one of the best things you can do to keep your designerly skills sharp. Crazy you say? Well maybe, but lets think about this. Being a designer is more than just making things “pretty” and having mad photoshop skillz. Being a designer is about telling a story without words…unless there’s typography involved, then I guess it’s about telling a better story than the words could tell alone. Whether you believe it or not our picture-centric brains can actually benefit from trying to string words together to tell a story the same way we arrange things on a page and pick colors or fonts. Your story telling skills are just as important as your photoshop or drawing skills, actually they’re more important because you can probably teach a monkey how to manipulate photos and we all know it takes 1000 monkeys to write Shakespear, so you do the math. Now, speaking as someone who is going into his 3rd NaNoWriMo and has yet to write a novel, I’ve adopted some alternate rules, because they’re not the boss of me!! This is my plan, feel free to try it out if you’re totally overwhelmed by the idea of writing a novel. You gotta walk before you crawl, right? So go write something this year, even if you only commit to write 5,000 words of non-fiction, take some time in November to work on your story telling skills, you’ll be better for it. If you want to discuss NaNoWriMo strategy, plan a meet up in the Seattle area, or want to tell me I’m a total idiot, feel free to do so in the comments. Tony’s 2009 NaNoWriMo plan (Steal and use as needed): If you want to watch my novel’s progress using the above strategy you can so so at my NaNoWriMo page
