NaNoWriMo countdown

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At 12:01am on November first, hundreds of thousands of fingers will start pounding keyboards in a frenzied effort to crank out a novel in just 30 days.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a gonzo word spree whose goal is to coax a 50K-word-novel out of every participant. Now in its 11th year, NaNoWriMo has been steadily growing from its origin as a 21-member "noveling binge" in the San Francisco Bay area. Last year, according to organizers, there were almost 120,000 entries, with over 20,000 "winners."

And how do you win? One simple, unassailable metric: You write 50K words. No literary standards. No judging. Nobody even reads the entries; they're just word-counted by a web site. It's the process, organizers say, that makes this kind of thing worthwhile.

"The 50,000-word challenge has a wonderful way of opening up your imagination and unleashing creative potential like nothing else," NaNoWriMo Founder and Program Director (and ten-time NaNoWriMo winner) Chris Baty said in a statement. "When you write for quantity instead of quality, you end up getting both. Also, it's a great excuse for not doing any dishes for a month."

Local groups of participants have "write-ins" to help keep everyone motivated, and there is a great web site, complete with a "Procrastination Station" (go for the exercises, stay for the dolphin cheese). Online discussion boards and e-mails help keep everyone in touch and maintain a sense of community.

But it's not all just for fun and camaraderie, say the organizers. More than 30 NaNoWriMo novelists have had their "NaNo-novels" published, including Sarah Gruen, whose New York Times #1 Best Seller, Water for Elephants began as a NaNoWriMo novel.

I've never done NaNoWriMo before, so this is going to be an interesting experience. Pushing 50,000 words out in a month seems pretty daunting. I wrote 5 short stories during the six weeks of the Clarion workshop, but that was probably about 30K in total. And I will admit that I was pretty fried by the time that was over.

Bottom line: You can expect me to yak about this a fair bit during November. And if my coverage of local meetings is just a bit thinner, I hope you'll understand.

ps: I do have an outline for the novel, a hard-sf secret history of the end of WWII.

Comments

just include your coverage of meetings in the novel. I'm pretty sure it could pass for fiction.

Hi, Maddie...
...Fiction has to make sense. Unless one were doing a sequel to "Bartleby the Scrivener," crossed with Abbot and Costello, much of the dialog would need to be significantly tweaked.

Cheers.
-j

Unless they changed the rules, because the rules used to say that the 50,000 words had to be freshly started in November. Which means for the last three years, I've been FiNoing or trying to Finish Novel.

But 50,000 words would definitely finish off S&L and give me paring room. So it's FiNoing for me.

...she sings from somewhere you can't see...

Hi, PixelFish...
I'm fortunate to have an outline for a novel that I actually did several years ago at Gibraltar Point -- spent the whole week just doing an outline, and the only actual text I did managed was a one-page prologue, which I won't include in the word count.

Paring is where it's at. One of my favorite quotes from Stanley Kubrick: "Everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing a film to edit."

Cheers.
-j