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What is NaNoWriMo, and is it fattening?



NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is a group (organization, cult?) that tries to encourage people to achieve the rather bizarre goal of trying to write a novel in 30 days. The rules are simple. You start writing on November 1st. By midnight on November 30th if you have written 50,000 words, you are a “winner”. It does not matter what you write, how good it is, what genre it is. If you write 50,000 words, you win. This has been going on since about 2000. In 2016 there were 445,000 participants worldwide.

I first got involved in 2007 as a way to encourage my wife (who is also a writer) to get writing. I really wasn’t sure what it would be like. I thought I might work on it for a few days. I don’t think I really believed that I would finish. But then something happened. That something was named Nikki. See, when you sign up for NaNoWriMo at https://nanowrimo.org, you are required to join a region. This is intended to connect you with people in your area that are doing the same. Each Region has a person in charge and that person is called a “Municipal Liaison”. This person schedules group events and “write-ins” and generally tries to keep the people in the region motivated. Just before November, we had a group meeting for anyone in our region who wanted to attend. We went to the meeting and met Nikki who was our Municipal Liaison (or “ML”), and she was so enthusiastic that it was catching. She had scheduled write-ins at places around town, had prizes for people who met writing goals: you hit 10,000 words, you get a prize, 20,000 words, you get a prize etc.. You write 3,000 words in one day, you take a dare like writing a random quote into your novel, these and many other things would get you a prize. She had score cards for each of us. You did not have to participate, but why not? It was a good motivational tool. She also emailed us encouraging suggestions to keep going (How did she have time to write her own novel? And did I mention that ML’s are volunteers?) As you meet the other people in your region, there is a sense of community and camaraderie with others who are doing this crazy thing with you.

Before I had known it, I had written 20,000 words. Well, if I’d gone that far, might as well finish right? I am not going to tell you it is easy, because once you have written 10,000 or 20,000 words you have a sense of accomplishment, but you also realize that you have a hell of a lot of words still to write. It can be daunting.

My wife and I both finished that year. We both got winner’s certificates and we both got to go to the final wrap up party (Actually, even if you can’t finish, Nikki will still let you come to the party. What a great ML!)

I found that I had written a pretty good story. It was called “The Down Side of Eternity.” I had this idea for the story kicking around in my head for years which I thought might be a short story or possibly something longer. But every time I sat down to write, I ran into endless quandaries about where to go with it, how to approach it. The story could go this way, or it could go that way. Each decision led to further endless possible decision branches. I was stymied. So I would set it aside and a year or two later think about starting the story again.

In this way NaNoWriMo was very liberating for me. You have to average 1666 words per day if you are going to reach 50,000. I did not have time to dither about the various choices. I had to pick one and go! And the same was true for the next set of choices and the next. Whether the choice I picked were the best choices or not I would worry about later and fix it if need be. Having a deadline forced me to be productive and it was a system that worked for me. I felt so good about the final product that after it was over, I spent several months editing it and fleshing it out (50,000 words is actually pretty short for a novel). I sent it to a number of publishers, but although I had a couple of nibbles, ultimately no publisher bought it.

Over the ensuing years I have participated in and finished NaNoWriMo six times. This past November I wrote the novel "Star Liner" which seemed pretty good to me. So after editing it I sent it off to a publisher who (to my astonishment) accepted it the next day.

I recognize that this fire hose approach to writing is a process that does not work well for everyone.  But for me, NaNoWriMo works wonderfully. 

So thanks, Nikki!

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