NaNoWriMo Time!

Published in The Packet

The number of locally written and published books stacked in Newfoundland gift shops astounds me. It seems that Newfoundlanders always have a story to tell, and that the history of this province is a gold mine for the amateur novelist.

If you harbor secret literary aspirations, there is no better time to try your hand at novel writing than November. National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short) kicked off on midnight of October 31^st. 

NaNoWriMo is an internet-based creative challenge designed to get people writing. A work of writing is considered a novel when it reaches 40,000 words. NaNoWriMo encourages participants to spend each day of November writing approximately 1,600 words per night. By the end of November, they’ll have a 50,000-word manuscript. There are 180, 138 writers from around the world signed up to participate this year, as of this article’s deadline.

Participants enter the NaNoWriMo challenge by logging in to nanowrimo.org and creating a profile. Each day they update the word count of their work and add it to the website. Beginning November 25, participants can submit their novel to the website and have it validated. The site will officially count up their words and if they’ve met 50,000 words, it will declare them a winner.

The goal of the project isn’t necessarily for the writer to produce a work that wins a Pulitzer Prize. Fear of failure keeps many prospective writers from ever trying to write a novel. NaNoWriMo celebrates quantity of words instead of quality of words. Participants don’t feel self-conscious about what they are writing, because all that matters it that they write.  There is no backtracking, no editing, and no worrying allowed. This serves two goals. The first is to help writers develop the discipline to write everyday, which is the only way to really hone their craft. The second is to help writers get a first draft completed. Once that draft is complete, they can edit it at their leisure until it becomes the masterpiece they’ve envisioned.

Yes, you might write a lot of crap. Yes, you might produce a manuscript that spends the rest of it’s life collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. But you’ll have experienced the thrill of pushing aside your inner critic and creating for the sake of creating.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll write the next Water for Elephants, which best-selling author Sara Gruen wrote during NaNoWriMo. Only instead of a traveling circus, your story might be set right here in Newfoundland, feature a protagonist resembling your great grandmother, and a mystery involving the railway station, and…why are you still reading this? Go get started on your novel!