A poem a day

Every year as November rolls around, I think about joining in the National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo for short.

The idea is to challenge yourself to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. That’s an average of 1667 words per day. That is quite a challenge to many writers, myself included. On an average day I am generally happy with 500 – 1000 words. On a good day I might stretch this to 1500, and on a fabulous – albeit very rare – day I can even get over 2000. I think my best day was a super 3000 words, but that mean about 10 hours of work.

I considered joining the challenge again this year, but realistically I just don’t have the time with my many responsibilities outside of my writing.

Poem a day

So instead I am going for an easier, softer and far more achievable goal: a poem a day for the month of November. So far I’m on track. I might even publish a few of them here on this site. (The first one appeared here.)

I have done this successfully before. On a six week holiday in Ethiopia, Morocco and Spain we were away for 45 days and I wrote 55 poems. Admittedly, some of them were haiku, but I achieved my goal. And I wrote some great poems as well.

Thought: perhaps I will create a new habit and write a poem every day of the year. Now that’s a challenge I can achieve.

Good writing.