NaNoWriMo Pledges

As NaNoWriMo approaches, there are some very sweet pledges doing the rounds.

Mine is a simple one: It’s November, which means NaNoWriMo! I’ve committed to writing 50,000 words of Into the Air: Into the Storm Trilogy Book Three. It will be hard, and challenging, and frustrating and exhausting and a million other supposedly negative things – but it’s also wonderful and productive and inspiring and all kinds of good things. It’s a kind of magic, I think, pouring your heart out onto the page and creating something physical from the ethereal whispers of passion, inspiration, wonder, imagination and sheer stubbornness…

I also love this one by Write To Live Free: “I hereby do pledge to write my allotted choice of words per day for days. I will update my word count every day, and have loads of fun doing it. If I quit, I have to remember that my writing will always be there, but if I do not quit, I must realise that I accomplished something great. But most of all I pledge to have fun doing it, and remember that no other author can tell your story the way you do. I sign my name to show my pledge below…”

And this lengthy, hilarious and very writerly one is awesome:
NaNoWriMo’s Month-Long Novelist Agreement and Statement of Understanding.
“I hereby pledge my intent to write a 50,000-word novel in one month’s time. By invoking an absurd, month-long deadline on such an enormous undertaking, I understand that notions of “craft”, “brilliance” and “competency” are to be chucked right out the window, where they will remain, ignored, until they are retrieved for the editing process.
I understand that I am a talented person, capable of heroic acts of creativity, and I will give myself enough time over the course of the next month to allow my innate gifts to come to the surface, unmolested by self-doubt, self-criticism, and other acts of self-bullying.
During the month ahead, I realise I will produce clunky dialogue, clichéd characters, and deeply flawed plots. I agree that all of these things will be left in my rough draft, to be corrected and/or excised at a later point. I understand my right to withhold my manuscript from all readers until I deem it completed. I also acknowledge my right as an author to substantially inflate both the quality of the rough draft and the rigors of the writing process should such inflation prove useful in garnering me respect and attention, or freedom from participation in onerous household chores.
I acknowledge that the month-long, 50,000-word deadline I set for myself is absolute and unchangeable, and that any failure to meet the deadline, or any effort on my part to move the deadline once the adventure has begun, will invite the well-deserved mockery from friends and family. I also acknowledge that, upon successful completion of the stated novelling objective, I am entitled to a period of gleeful celebration and revelry, the duration and intensity of which may preclude me from participating fully in workplace activities for days, if not weeks, afterward.”

There is a great one for Camp NaNoWriMo in April and July too, from the website: “I, talented author, hereby pledge to edit and revise my manuscript in these, the months following the word storm that was National Novel Writing Month. Above all, I promise to regard my novel with a critical but not cruel eye, for it is a work of my one-and-only imagination and deserves to be made even better.”
And there are also some wonderful responses to it from fellow writers here.