Articles of the Month

National Novel Writing Month 2002

November is National Novel Writing Month: you have exactly thirty days to produce a novel of fifty thousand words. That's approximately 1667 words per day. The cute name given to this contest is "NaNoWriMo"?a word of which I am heartily sick of due to constant exposure?but the month itself, if you are a participant, can be described as anything but cute.

National Novel Writing Month is international, with people participating from all over the world. I've been through it twice. Last year, I lost quite badly, but this year I won, completing my novel eight hours before the deadline with a final word count of 50,008. It was fantastic and worthy of much pride in comparison to last year's 9000 some words. Why such a big difference? I simply tried harder this year and refused to give in as I did in November 2001.

Although NaNoWriMo is labeled a contest, there is no tangible prize. But the winner gets satisfaction and an entire novel out of it!

The contest's website is much nicer than it was last year: each author has an account and a profile page, and all the information can be found in a searchable database. On the profile page, there is personal information the author wanted to share, their favourite authors, any links to their website or novel, a novel excerpt if they wished to provide one, and, of course, most importantly, the word count.

Another great feature demonstrating the vast improvement of the NaNoWriMo website was the forums. There was a large number of boards to fit everyone's need for community as they wrote their novel. There were groups for geographical regions, novel types, writing types, character types?whatever you wanted to talk about or find out, you had the means of doing so. As for myself, I knew I was very likely to get so caught up in the discussions that I would neglect my novel, so for the most part I avoided the message boards.

For anyone who is interested in writing a novel, or even just in writing, I really encourage you to join next year. Although it was hard work, and I chose to neglect some aspects of my regular life (i.e. schoolwork, but, c'mon, is that really such a bad thing?) in favour of writing up a storm every night, I feel that the experience was worth it. By the end of the month you can have a whole novel, or part of one, under your belt?and what an accomplishment that would be!

I've taken a lot of satisfaction and pride out of completing my novel. Even last year it felt good just to dedicate myself to getting a story down into Microsoft Word for as long as I could and felt like doing. Not to mention that not having the stress of writing an average of 1667 words by the end of the day did wonders for my ability to relax!

They say that everyone has a story to tell. But will you tell yours? And how fast will you do it? http://www.nanowrimo.org/