> For many writers, 1666 words a day, every day, is a bit too much to expect.
Well, with NaNoWriMo you have a whole month. So some days you may in fact have 0 words, and other days you'll have 4000. But in general, the more you do this, the easier it is. Are weekly 2000 word essays from college students who don't really care about English or Sociology or whatever class the essays are for too much to expect? Maybe. I know that after a few months of blogging 1000+ word blogs on a relatively frequent basis, those school essays are trivial.
> Second, the requirement that the project start from zero is also a deterrent—it encourages a “starter” attitude when what’s needed is a “finisher”.
The idea is that at the end of the month you evaluate what you have and decide if it's worth finishing and revising. Your work is not supposed to be "perfectly good". This is the same philosophy over at the Ludum Dare 48 hour game programming competition ( http://ludumdare.com/compo/about-ludum-dare/ ) where you start from scratch and see what you can do. Many people have taken their finished entries and continued to work on them, eventually selling them for real money. Most people don't, they abandon the project, and that's fine. They learned something along the way that will help them be a better game developer the next time around or in a context where they have more time.
Well, with NaNoWriMo you have a whole month. So some days you may in fact have 0 words, and other days you'll have 4000. But in general, the more you do this, the easier it is. Are weekly 2000 word essays from college students who don't really care about English or Sociology or whatever class the essays are for too much to expect? Maybe. I know that after a few months of blogging 1000+ word blogs on a relatively frequent basis, those school essays are trivial.
> Second, the requirement that the project start from zero is also a deterrent—it encourages a “starter” attitude when what’s needed is a “finisher”.
The idea is that at the end of the month you evaluate what you have and decide if it's worth finishing and revising. Your work is not supposed to be "perfectly good". This is the same philosophy over at the Ludum Dare 48 hour game programming competition ( http://ludumdare.com/compo/about-ludum-dare/ ) where you start from scratch and see what you can do. Many people have taken their finished entries and continued to work on them, eventually selling them for real money. Most people don't, they abandon the project, and that's fine. They learned something along the way that will help them be a better game developer the next time around or in a context where they have more time.