[AE.NiNoBilMa] Introducing NiNoBilMa 2022
So November will be ending in a few days, and with it, NaNoWriMo.
While I've relished the effect that ADHD medication has had on my ability to sit down and write, I did not participate in NaNoWriMo except in my own idiosyncratic interpretation of it as "National November, Write More", if only because I'm still figuring out how this "writing" thing works with such a fundamental shift in my brain chemistry and functioning. Which is not a bad thing! The changes have been uniformly good... they just take some figuring out.
And part of figuring out how things work is figuring out how they don't.
I've come to understand that many of my struggles over the years with writing -- writer's block, focus problems, follow-through -- weren't just ADHD acting on me in the present but the effects of having gone through my formative years with the one-two punch of untreated ADHD and what the internet calls Gifted Child Syndrome.
Throughout my adult life, I have had some phenomenally good writing streaks and also a lot of dry spells, and I am coming to understand the reason for this: since the parts of school that engaged me had very little overlap with the parts of school that challenged me, my childhood prepared me to do things really well whenever they come easily, and not at all when they don't. I didn't learn how to do things the hard way because I was good enough often enough to coast on doing them the easy way.
Over the past month I've been noodling around with different approaches to picking up and refining the skills that I was meant to have mastered before I even dreamed of launching a career. Obviously furthering my formal education is an option, at least in the abstract, but a solution that would fit my needs better would be something cheap or free and something I could do on my own time while also trying to (re)build up my career... and maybe ideally provide some unique content for my readers.
The solution I hit on started with a few unconnected observations about writing techniques and tools I stumbled upon that I found really worked, things I was aware of and could recite but had never internalized or appreciated, and definitely hadn't fully mastered at any point.
One afternoon as I found myself struggling to do a touch of non-fiction writing so I could send out a newsletter, I found myself admiring the clarity of the three-point essay format. I was thinking in particular of how the simple practice of stating a thesis up front, elaborating on it, and then re-stating it at the conclusion was a more effective way of making sure one's intended message comes across than basically anything I've made much use of as an adult.
But having made this observation, I found I struggled to apply it. It wasn't a matter of not being able to find instructions or not knowing how to apply them, but more one of practice and confidence with the forms... things I might have acquired in high school, if things had gone differently.
And I thought, these obstacles would not be insurmountable, but I'm also working on overcoming more basic deficiencies in my formal skills, and so it would probably be easier to deal with the more advanced problems after working through the more basic ones.
And then I thought, that makes sense, given that they're instilled in students in an order that builds upwards from the earliest lessons to the more complex ones, so it's a shame that I can't just start at the beginning.
And then I thought: who says I can't? The nature of the beast of adulthood is that no one is going to create the same kind of elaborate organized structure to teach me specific skills as I went through in childhood... but no one is going to stop me from doing it myself.
So here we come to my big idea: NiNoBilMa.
I call it my idea, but I confess it's not wholly original. Possibly some people of a similar age and background to me reading this have already had a similar association spring to mind between the musings I've been describing and a certain mid-90s Adam Sandler vehicle.
Is this a new idea? No. It's Billy Madison.
If you aren't familiar with the film in question, the high concept is that Adam Sandler plays a grown but spoiled man-child who has to go back and pass a compressed two-week version of each grade of United States primary and secondary education, K through 12, over the course of a few months, stemming from a situation where somebody wanted to make a movie featuring Adam Sandler as a grown but spoiled man-child who goes through Kindergarten to 12th grade over the course of a few months.
That's not to say I'm setting out to recreate the plot of a movie I haven't otherwise thought about for decades. Even if it were feasible, I'm not interested in literally reliving the classroom experience, nor disrupting the actual educational opportunities of a bunch of children. More importantly, I'm doing this for my own specific reasons, I'm focusing on a single discipline rather than general education, I have an actual life and responsibilities to deal with around this, and I can do it on my own timetable rather than satisfying terms dictated by the stakes and demands of a movie plot.
So here's the deal.
First, disclaimers. I'm not an educator, licensed or otherwise. Calling what I'm doing a "curriculum" or "lesson plan" would be taking too much credit. But I am putting together a series of prompts/exercises and a loose schedule for myself, and I'm willing to share these with anyone else who wants to play along on their own time or find inspiration for their own version of the challenge.
Each month of 2022 will correspond to one academic year, at least symbolically, with December of this year serving as Kindergarten and January starting elementary school. The exact skills that young children are learning when they first learn to write in school aren't the same as the ones I'm lacking, so for lower elementary in particular I'm going to be taking more inspiration from the form of the lessons they use than from their actual purposes.
December (Kindergarten):
Actual Kindergarteners are still learning how to write in the most basic sense of "This is how a word is written," so my inspiration here comes from some of the other subject matters that Kindergarteners study: colors, numbers, shapes, and animals.
My goal here is to practice sitting down and writing using a simple open-ended prompt as a starting point, in order to learn to write without hesitation, getting over basic inhibitions (writer's block, self-critic, inner editor, etc.) Stream of consciousness, journaling, random vignettes, very simple stories... if anything seems fruitful for becoming something else or something more, that's fine, but the goal of the exercises will not be to produce something useful or good. The definition of success here is to write anything.
On a more meta level, the goal for the month for the project as a whole will be to generate some attention and interest through simple participatory exercises to hopefully get more people on board before things begin in earnest in January. I'd be perfectly willing to do this whole thing alone if no one else was interested, but I'd love to see it take off and grow into something bigger than one person. Whatever results I achieve for myself, I'll consider the project a success if I hear from one person that it helped them in their writing, and a roaring success if I hear that from or about anybody I don't even know
So this introductory month will be the most informal and casual month of NiNoBilMa 2022, basically consisting of warm-up exercises and mental icebreakers. After all, it's a busy and demanding time of year for many people, and nobody including myself will have had much time to prepare. I plan on just having fun with it, writing in whatever style occurs to me, maybe sometimes getting more literal with the element of recapturing childhood freedom by writing with the voice or point of view of a child and other times writing in my natural and customary writing voice.
The nature of my prompts are simple and openended to the point that any one of them could be reused by one person, potentially infinitely, meaning that other participants can do as much or as little as they want to and have time for. I will be sharing digests of my own results each week, lightly curated for content or other reasons but not edited or vetted for quality or semblance of a point.
January (1st Grade):
Switch from open-ended prompts to similarly simple but more directed prompts, with both a starting point and a specified direction to write in, with a goal of being able to not just sit down and write on demand but to write within or towards a constraint without losing any flow.
My exact plans for it and even more so each subsequent month are still fluid and likely to be adjusted based on how things go when I'm actually doing it, but the idea here is not much different than it would be for Kindergarten, with the prompts being a bit less abstract and more specific but still not concerned with quality or consistency; not many rules per se, mostly still just writing.
And again, my plan is to share the fruits of my results.
February through June (2nd through 6th Grade)
As the first half of the year goes on, I'll be expanding the exercises in complexity in terms of both the prompts I use and the goals, with a vague target of coming out of June with the ability to sit down and write a structured story or argument with a solid beginning, middle, and ending
July and Afterwards (7th through 12th Grade)
...is incredibly up in the air, given that I don't know how the next seven months will go in terms of either this project or just, you know, in general. Assuming I'm still in a position to keep the project going and there haven't been any major course corrections, it's going to be a process of continuing to build each month on the previous month's progress.
With each month's goals becoming more specific and more complicated than the previous month's, it's likely that the "course load" will shift over the course of the year from "here are a bunch of reusable prompts and exercises to do with them as often as one wishes, time allowing" to "here's the end goal for the month and here are some steps to get there."
But that's getting ahead of myself.
Let's talk about now... or at least, soon... and you.
How You Can Take Part
I'm going to be sharing my prompts/exercises both through my Buttondown newsletter (using the pseudotag in the subject line of AE.NiNoBilMa in case any subscribers wish to filter for or against such content) and on my Patreon, under the tag of both NiNoBilMa and NiNoBilMa 2022 (just in case there winds up being more than one of these). Any examples of my own work will go up on my Patreon. This content will be free through both channels; as with most of my creative output, I am happy to be supported in my endeavors by those who are happy to support them.
My Patreon may also host some behind-the-scenes process posts and any additional work I put into refining the raw output of my efforts, and throughout the process, I may -- time and logistics allowing -- hold virtual write-ins and co-working sessions, some of which may be open to anyone who is interested (space allowing) and others which may be reserved for paid subscribers to my newsletter or Patreon.
But the basic opportunity to participate will be open to anybody who wants to participate, in whatever way and at whatever level they wish to. You don't need to subscribe to anything, buy anything, register for anything, or get a signed permission slip. If you want to take my (obviously not wholly original) idea and run with it in a different way or even a completely different direction, to work on the skills you feel like developing, I don't mind.
And while a year-long project whose second half is little more than vapor might seem like a big commitment to make... well, you don't have to commit to take part. You can do whatever you have time for, whatever catches your eye, whatever strikes your fancy. If my stuff works for you initially but you find the direction of my personal development diverging from your own goals, that's fine! And if your life gets too busy as this project becomes more involved, that's life! It's not like I plan on taking the exercises down at the end of each month.
There's no actual homework, nothing to submit, and nothing will be graded. While I'm spearheading this project and creating the exercises, I am not doing it as a teacher but as a student and I am sharing my ideas and experiences in the hopes of knowing that I'm working alongside other students. I'm not in a position to offer feedback or critique or a grade for anybody else's work but should you choose to share any of your work or even just your general experiences, I hope you'll post it to the social web with the hashtag #NiNoBilMa and/or #NiNoBilMa2022.
That's the preferred capitalization for screenreader compatibility: Ni No Bil Ma. On a related note, I pronounce the first half like the name "Nino" and the second half rhyming with "Wilma", but I don't think it much matters.
Anyway. That's the basic pitch, as it exists now. If you're interested and reading this but not already a subscriber, you can join me on Patreon or sign up for the newsletter. As previously mentioned, all basic NiNoBilMa content will be unlocked so you won't need a paid subscription. If you don't feel like giving either of the platforms I use your information, just bookmark the newsletter archive page or the tag on my Patreon page and check it weekly starting in the first full week of December.
I might post or tweet about the project more in the next week if anything important occurs to me or it becomes clear there are questions, but right now my current plan is to put out the exercises on Mondays, starting with the first Monday in December (the 6th).
So, if you're interested... see you then.
(Metaphorically.)