NaNoWriMo Vs. 30 Hubs in 30 Days

In 2006, I read Chris Baty’s book, No Plot? No Problem: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. This is the book that inspired the creation of NaNoWriMo. Check out NaNoWriMo.org to learn more about this fast-paced national novel-writing craze.

The book is inspiring, to say the least. By the end of it, I thought, ‘Hey, I can do that.’ So I did. I dedicated 30 days of my life (in August, though, not November. November never does work out for me as a good month to write - too much holiday/family stuff going on - and I always - ALWAYS get sick during the month of November and never have enough energy to do anything) to finally completing a novel.

At the end of this past March, I heard about the HubPages writing contest and the concurrent 30 Hubs in 30 Days Challenge for the month of April. Once again I thought, ‘Hey, I can do that.’

I was instantly reminded of my 30-day novel writing experience, so I thought, for my 30th hub (which is actually being published on Day 32 - not Day 30), I would write a hub comparing the 2 experiences. This is how they measure up.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to have, at the end of 30 days, 50,000 words of your novel completed. You will not have a complete novel (i.e., the novel will not be as polished as you can possibly make it), but you will have a complete story (i.e., a beginning, middle, and end). For this to occur, you have to write at least 1667 words per day.

By the time I finished my 30 days of novel writing in August of 2006, I had 60,000 words done, so that averages out to 2000 words per day.

Summing up all the words for the 30 Hubs Challenge, including this one, I’ve written a little under 26,550 words. That averages out to about 885 words per day.

That’s a pretty decent word count for hubs. But why did I write half the number of words per day hubbing compared to when I was writing my novel? There are a few reasons that I can think of.

With my 30-day novel-writing experience, I had a good idea what I was going to write. I’d outlined the whole plot beforehand and used that outline when I was writing the novel. Sometimes I would deviate from the outline - when my characters began to take charge of their own actions, and that’s when the real fun started.

I didn’t have that much focus with the 30 days of hubbing. I didn’t have a single outline I was working from. I didn’t even have multiple outlines. I just came up with a few ideas and began writing. My 30 hubs covered a lot of different topics: my daughter’s favorite things; recipes, celebrities, genealogy, pest extermination, pets, and even financial things, like stock picking (my husband’s contribution since he likes to use my HubPages account from time to time to publish things that interest him).

I think the 30-day hub challenge would have been a lot easier for me to complete had I stuck to one topic and written 30 hubs about that one topic. Now, I don’t really know how easy it would have been to do that, but maybe I’ll try that the next time I attempt to do a 30-day hub challenge. Maybe I’ll do the 100 Hubs in 30 Days Challenge next?? Um, maybe not!

In 2006, I was not married and I didn’t have any children. So, I had more time to write. I could block out whole Saturday mornings and afternoons to devote only to my novel.

I could not do that with this hub challenge because now I have a husband and two daughters - a two-year-old and a six-month-old. My Saturday mornings and afternoons are no longer my own. Sometimes I’ll wake up much earlier than anyone else in the family, and that’s when I take the time to write my hubs. But it doesn’t always work out.

Considering I self-published my novel on Lulu.com and didn't promote it heavily, not many people have read it. When I read it again after publishing, I didn’t think it was very good, so I don’t really encourage people to read it. I might go back and fix things up later to try to make it better. Then I won’t have to be so embarrassed by it.

My hubs, I’m glad to say, do get read. And, for the most part, I’m pretty proud of them and think that they do offer something of value to whoever reads them. I’ve gotten great feedback about so many of my hubs from so many other great hubbers. I'm really grateful for this community and am glad I found it!

Overall, I’d have to say that writing a novel in 30 days was a whole lot easier than writing 30 hubs in 30 days.

But, like I mentioned, my life circumstances have changed dramatically since I wrote that novel in 30 days. So I wonder if, given the way things are now, it would still be easier to write a novel. I might just have to give it a try. I have a couple of novel ideas going in the back of my head. I should probably put them down on paper at some point.

For now, though, I think I’ll just concentrate on promoting all the hubs I just wrote for this challenge, even though it did take me a little longer than 30 days to complete.