SoTLWriMo

Hello all, and welcome to SoTLWriMo. This is the brainchild of Nathalie and Sarah, and it stands for SoTL Writing Month. During the month of November we are going to commit to some regular SoTL writing each day and, with a little help from our friends (including our AI buddies!), we’ve put together some strategies to help us through.

So what is SoTLWriMo?  In brief, it’s inspired by other monthly writing initiatives such as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo), As NaNoWriMo says:

Writing a novel alone can be difficult, even for seasoned writers. NaNoWriMo helps you track your progress, set milestones, connect with other writers in a vast community, and participate in events that are designed to make sure you finish your novel.

And likewise AcWriMo describes itself as being:

Inspired by the amazing NaNoWriMo, it caters to the specific needs of academic writers at all stages of their career (from undergrads to the most distinguished of professors). The idea is that you set yourself a writerly goal and get stuck in with all the information, advice and support you’ll get from everyone taking part. The month helps us:

• Think about how we write,
• Form a valuable support network for our writing practice,
• Build better strategies and habits for the future,
• And maybe – just maybe – get stuff done

• Goal setting – decide for yourself what you’d like to do during SoTLWriMo
• Statement of intent – tell us, or somebody else, what you plan to do
• Plan your strategy – decide for yourself (share if you’d like) how you will achieve this (scroll down for some ideas)
• Discuss your progress – tell others how you are getting on. What works? What doesn’t work? How are you feeling about it all?
• Keep on going – however much or little you manage, celebrate every step.
• Declare your results – you can do this as often as you like. Every day? Every week? Just at the end? It’s up to you – but we’d love to hear how you are getting on.

Here’s some of the strategies we think will help:

• Daily/weekly target: set your word count, use SoTLWriMo to stay motivated.
• Dedicated SoTL time: set aside some time each day (this can be as little as 3 minutes) for SoTL planning/writing.
• Micro-writing – use a set of prompts to build up your writing each day. Nathalie and Notion AI wrote these.
• Find or make a set of prompts to inspire you each day – maybe use these Sarah has adapted.
• Alison suggests using Helen Sword’s Pomodori to help with timed writing.
• Pick N Mix  – use parts of any or all of the above as you wish.

We’re going to be rolling this out in our SoTLWriMo Teams Channel, and you are welcome to join us there, or to go your own way and use any of our resources as you wish. However you engage, and whatever you do, we’d love to hear how you get on.