Today is Wednesday, November 1st, 2023 – the first day of National Novel Writing Month, usually referred to NaNoWriMo. If you haven’t heard of this before, NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write 50,000 words by the end of this month. This translates to 1,667 words a day, or anywhere between two and four hours of writing. The very first year I attempted this challenge, I “won” – that is, I completed 50,000 words of a rather stupid novel that I ended up disliking very, very much.

But that’s not the ...