Before coming into tech, I taught college English for ten years. I wrote a lot. I read a lot of student writing. I talked about writing a lot. In the United States, every November, there’s a month-long event called National Novel Writing Month, fondly known as NaNoWriMo. During that month, writers are challenged to write 50,000 words during the month--the equivalent of a short novel. In November 2020, NaNoWriMo became our very first monthly challenge at Virtual Coffee. Instead of trying to individually write that many words, we decided to write as a community. This year, we’re inviting you to join along!

Whether you’re a seasoned tech writer or have never written about anything in tech, we think this is a great time to grow and enjoy the community aspect of writing this November.

National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a daunting but straightforward challenge: to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days. Now, each year on November 1, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with a first draft. They enter the month as elementary school teachers, mechanics, or stay-at-home parents. They leave novelists.

Writing can help you to solidify ideas, learn in public, grow your tech career, and find a community that helps you to thrive.

Official Topic

Although we encourage you to write on anything tech-related, we’re providing extra support and resources for those writing on “building your personal brand.” By the end of the month, we hope to create a guide on our site with that topic with links to the resources we’ve collected throughout November.

How to Participate

1. Start by setting a goal. Your goal might be to hit a certain number of words during the month, to create a writing habit of writing a little bit a day, or to write in a new style.
2. Share your goal and your blog posts in the comments of this post and in our final check-in discussion.
3. Write!

Inspiration and Motivation

Sometimes, the hardest part of writing is staring at the blank page. You might not know where to get started. Here are some ideas to get you started, but the best idea is always to write about something that interests you, you’ve just learned, or you’re currently learning. Here are some ideas:

• How to use a particular technology
• Your Hacktoberfest experience or your open source contributions
• Compare and contrast technologies
• Explore the history of tech
• Tech trends to watch
• How to do an accessibility audit
• The value of reading and writing documentation
• Cool tools, tips, and tricks that can help other developers
• The interview process
• Creative coding
• Myths of the dark web

For more ideas, check out the topic suggestions we collected for last year’s challenge or use some of the discussion topics we’ve talked about at Virtual Coffee.

Motivating yourself can be hard. That’s why we believe in doing it together. Sharing your work, supporting others, and providing a positive community can help us all achieve our goals this year. Let us know your goals in the chat below or tell us what you'd like to read about this month!