Logo of NationalNovelWritingMonth
Take note all you potential best-selling authors! If you’ve always had a hankering to write the Great American Novel, today is the day to begin. The first of November marks the start of another NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month.
Begun in 1999 in San Francisco, NaNoWriMo is an internet-based creative writing project that takes place during the month of November. The challenge: participants write 50,000 words (NaNoWriMo’s minimum number for a novel) from November 1st until the deadline at 11:59 p.m. on November 30th! The goal: to get people writing and to keep them motivated for a month. Quantity rather than quality is emphasized. Writers are encouraged to finish their first draft; editing can come later.
After registering on the website, participants are provided with tips for combatting writer’s block, are provided with an online community of support and are told about local places (probably not very ‘local’ for Peninsula writers) where participants are meeting. The year it began, 21 people participated. By 2010, over 200,000 people took part and wrote a total of over 2.8 billion words. Wow!
Water for Elephants
I’m not sure it’s just my dish of tea, but I can think of several writer friends who might be interested. In fact, I wonder if some of them have tried it. And, lest you think that the entire idea is a bit hokey, let me mention that a number of notable novels have come out of the project including: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, published by Doubleday; The Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater Rhodes, published by Delacorte Press– to name just a few.
Come to think of it… I do have a novel that I’ve been noodling about. Maybe I’ll just take a look at the website — http://nanowrimo.org/. After all, what could it hurt?
I LOVED “Water for Elephants”….hummm; I too have some ideas floating around. The memoir class we have been taking concludes with a reading on Sunday afternoon. What might be the next project?