November is National Novel Writing Month, when tens of thousands of people take part in an annual 'contest' to write 50,000 words in 30 days. After talking to Guelphites who plan to write their own books, Kate Hopwood decided to try her hand at novelling,
Like so many ideas that seemed good at the time, this one started over drinks. While sipping daiquiris at a cottage last summer, two friends and I had a conversation about romance novels. We'd all read a couple and had some laughs contrasting the formulaic stories with our own love lives. Then the rum started talking, and the three of us decided to pen our own Harlequin-style books -- just to prove we could.
Back in civilization, I quickly dismissed the idea. I figured I was crazy. I might think I could do it, but sitting down to write a whole book was something else entirely.
I'm not the only person who thinks she has a novel in her. Plenty of people are convinced that, given the right set of circumstances, they too could publish a work of fiction for the world to admire. But the reality of life makes it difficult. These same people have jobs, families, school and a whack of other legitimate time-sucking commitments. Novel writing is something to be talked about, not to actually do, right?
Actually, no. More than 100,000 members of an online community have proven otherwise. Each November at NaNoWriMo.org, the National Novel Writing Month home page, people decide to accomplish something they've dreamed about for years. They log into the website, keep track of their progress, and write a 50,000-word novel -- in 30 days. It's called a contest, but the "winners" -- anyone who hits the target number of words -- get little more than a certificate and a sense of personal pride.
The idea started in 1999 with Californian Chris Baty and 20 of his friends. They imposed a deadline of a month and started writing. Six of them finished, but the whole group had enough fun that they went online the next year, when 140 people signed up. It quickly snowballed; more than 100,000 people registered at NaNoWriMo.org in 2007.
About 20 Guelphites have signed up for this fall's NaNoWriMo. Many have tried it before, though not all were successful. After meeting some of them and catching some of their enthusiasm, I decided to join in. Once I remembered my romance-novel-writing "pact," I realized the idea is still floating around in my brain and despite myself, I'm intrigued. So along with thousands of amateur novellists in Canada and around the world this month, I'm going to write a book.
Chris Baty, who continues to run the contest he founded, told me it's like running a marathon.
"It's just a great personal challenge. You set this ridiculous, overly ambitious goal, and then you just spend a month achieving it."
He should know, since he's continued to participate in the challenge every year. Today, Baty will start writing his 10th NaNo-WriMo novel, and said he still looks forward to it all year long.
"Every single year in November it's the busiest month of my life, and I still just love it," he said over the phone from California. "There's something about doing something with 100,000 other people -- even though it can be painful at times, it just feels fun."
The personal challenge is what draws most people to the contest, judging by what Guelph's "NaNos" say.
"I just want to write it and say that I did it," said Matthew Dryden, who is determined to succeed in this, his second attempt. Writing a novel in any time frame is a daunting task, he said, and doing it in a month is really scary. He tried last year but only got about a tenth of the way. With a wife, son and full-time job, it's easy to find reasons to walk away from a project like this and he pretty much had given up. Who has the time when you're working 60 hours a week and looking after a family? But writing is important to him, so this September he started getting back into it.
This year, Dryden's job takes up less of his time and he realized how important it was to get back in touch with his creative side. He's been getting himself into practice by spending the last two months writing between 1,400 and 2,000 words a day -- to finish the 50,000-word novel, NaNos must write an average of 1,667 words every day in November.
There aren't many hard and fast rules to the competition, but no one is allowed to start before Nov. 1. Planning plots and creating outlines are encouraged, but the novel itself is a November-only project. The 50,000-word finish line is also non-negotiable. Either you reach it or you don't. There's still value to attempting the contest (most people don't finish), but the length was chosen for a reason. Though it sounds like a lot, it's actually a little too short for what most publishers would consider a novel. It's really a novella, an extended short story. But part of the ethos of NaNoWriMo is that the daunting task is still something accomplishable, and getting the words out is the most important part. You're writing a novel now because if you don't do it now, you never will. It's about quantity, not quality. Editing is for December, and many writers do revisit or expand their novels after the contest is over. Some have even been published.
Novelling within the confines of this contest may seem whimsical but, much like running a marathon, it is easier if you've been training. After failing to reach 50,000 words last time, Dryden is determined to make it this year.
He's used to the daily word count and, starting today, he'll pound out his quota of words every morning until he's finished.
"My goal is to stay persistent, to stay on target," he says.
People who have already completed novels in previous years often come back for more. Second-year University of Guelph student Beth Faulkner is taking part in her fifth NaNoWriMo -- the last two of which she completed successfully.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
100% perspiration
National Novel Writing Month began at midnight. With the 50,000-word deadline just 30 days away, Michael Dwyer slips on his writing sneakers.
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
- W. Somerset Maugham
WRITERS LOVE RULES and mantras and motivational aphorisms. We're like athletes that way. "Write what you know" and "Show, don't tell" are standard nuggets of locker-room wisdom. "Just do it" is the best one of all. No, wait. That's a sports wear commercial.
There is a canny writer's equivalent, however, which is both litmus test and definition: "Writers write." This is the unspoken axiom of National Novel Writing Month, actually an international undertaking that celebrates its 10th year this month.
The premise is laughably simple. Everyone on the planet is invited to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. That's about 175 pages of double-spaced type, from scratch, between now and midnight on November 30.
Training and planning are encouraged, but bringing prewritten prose to the table is "punishable by death", cautions the blurb at www.nanowrimo.org. "You'll care about the characters and story too much to write with the gleeful, anything-goes approach that makes NaNoWriMo such a creative rush.
"Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap," it continues. "It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly."
There are no prizes at the finishing line, but last year there were 15,333 "winners" in a field of 101,510.
Were their manuscripts any good? Hell no. Even Ernest Hemingway maintained that "the first draft of anything is shit", and he was Ernest Hemingway. He was also talking about the standard kind of first draft that usually takes a year or three to whack into shape.
The speed freak's first draft is much more about psychological process than literary flair, according to NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty. The Californian author of No Plot? No Problem! believes that leaving your inner critic choking in your dust can open almost mystical vistas of creativity.
He cites his own "interesting and confusing rule: When you write for quantity rather than quality, you often end up getting both of them. By giving up the idea of making every sentence perfect you get a momentum that allows you to tackle the larger story arc and really lose yourself in a very productive way.
"Characters take on a life of their own and you become more of an observer than a creator," he says. "Your novel becomes something that is unfolding as it goes and I think that's one of the great joys of writing, this sense of being surprised by your own imagination."
Ironically, the idea of NaNoWriMo is likely to sound less absurd to successful writers than to dilettantes. To the ubiquitous party bore who merely talks about writing a novel, the romance of inspiration seems paramount. In real life, it's stamina that separates authors from talkers, a fact acknowledged by many of the published writers whose "pep talks" appear on the NaNoWriMo website.
This online base is a virtual gymnasium of motivational games, tips and resources, as well as a scoreboard for tallying individual and collective daily word counts. It's also the nerve centre of a vast global organism in the grip of an escalating fever. Baty expects 20,000 new novels to materialise this year, more through the brute force of chat-group peer pressure than any more mysterious process.
"By making novel writing a social activity you tap into a spirit of camaraderie, and you also have a sense of accountability which you don't have when you've gone off to a cave to toil alone for a couple of years," he says. "People are gonna ask how your novel is doing and that is invaluable in keeping you on track when the going gets tough."
Last Sunday, about 50 members of Melbourne's NaNoWriMo chapter threw a pre-season barbie in Middle Park. As is often the case in large groups of strangers in this town, the conversation was mostly related to scores and degrees of fitness.
There were howls of envy for Scarlett, who can write 50,000 words in a day and "regularly beats whole regions". There were oaths through gritted teeth to "crush" Sydney, Montana, Saskatchewan - and especially Edinburgh, UNESCO's first "City of Literature". Melbourne came second, in August. But not this month, if one circle of twentysomething geeks, gamers and goths can summon a combined word count to equal their enthusiasm.
"It's like playing tennis or any sort of sport," said Steph, who crossed the 50,000-word finishing line on her third attempt last year. "Just because you're not a world champion doesn't mean you can't have a go."
This was just a fraction of Melbourne's 850-strong NaNoWriMo community. The majority, perhaps less comfortable with the rough and tumble of chat-group face time, was no doubt home alone, brainstorming synopses and character bios in the solitary space that is every novelist's paradise and prison.
So far, more than 25 books begun during NaNoWriMo have ultimately found publishers. Canadian author Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants even topped the New York Times bestsellers list last year.
Admittedly, taken from a nine-year total of more than 50,000 completed manuscripts, this result vaguely recalls that uncomfortable aphorism about typing monkeys. In the plotless caffeine frenzy of week three, that kind of wisdom is likely to be the marathon writer's nemesis.
Don't think about Stanislaw J.Lec's cruel advice to fledgling writers: "Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin." And it's definitely not worth dwelling on Truman Capote's withering riposte to Jack Kerouac: "That isn't writing, it's typing." Better to focus instead on more practical advice, such as Stephen King's adage that "any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word", and Kurt Vonnegut's first rule of creative writing: "Do not use semicolons ... all they do is show you've been to college."
CHRIS BATY HAS HEARD plenty of critics damning NaNoWriMo for "mocking the art form". He merely points out that novel writing has benefits to the individual imagination and sense of worth which have little to do with the publishing industry as we know it.
"For me, the success story is somebody who always loved books, who winds up finding something inside them that they didn't know was there. I get thousands of emails with that tale. People come away from this with this sense that, 'If I can write a book in a month, what else can I do?"'
Write another one, is the obvious answer. As the director and chief motivator of NaNoWriMo, Baty feels more pressure than most to knock off his 50,000 words every November. Of his nine completed manuscripts, four are "redeemable", he says. "That has been one of the surprising lessons for me, that you can write a reasonably unhorrible first draft in a month."
Stick that in your rulebook, budding novelists: "Forget masterpiece, aim for reasonably unhorrible." Then if you really want to bridge the gap, just add two words: second draft. That's what the other 11 months are for.
[The Age]
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
- W. Somerset Maugham
WRITERS LOVE RULES and mantras and motivational aphorisms. We're like athletes that way. "Write what you know" and "Show, don't tell" are standard nuggets of locker-room wisdom. "Just do it" is the best one of all. No, wait. That's a sports wear commercial.
There is a canny writer's equivalent, however, which is both litmus test and definition: "Writers write." This is the unspoken axiom of National Novel Writing Month, actually an international undertaking that celebrates its 10th year this month.
The premise is laughably simple. Everyone on the planet is invited to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. That's about 175 pages of double-spaced type, from scratch, between now and midnight on November 30.
Training and planning are encouraged, but bringing prewritten prose to the table is "punishable by death", cautions the blurb at www.nanowrimo.org. "You'll care about the characters and story too much to write with the gleeful, anything-goes approach that makes NaNoWriMo such a creative rush.
"Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap," it continues. "It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly."
There are no prizes at the finishing line, but last year there were 15,333 "winners" in a field of 101,510.
Were their manuscripts any good? Hell no. Even Ernest Hemingway maintained that "the first draft of anything is shit", and he was Ernest Hemingway. He was also talking about the standard kind of first draft that usually takes a year or three to whack into shape.
The speed freak's first draft is much more about psychological process than literary flair, according to NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty. The Californian author of No Plot? No Problem! believes that leaving your inner critic choking in your dust can open almost mystical vistas of creativity.
He cites his own "interesting and confusing rule: When you write for quantity rather than quality, you often end up getting both of them. By giving up the idea of making every sentence perfect you get a momentum that allows you to tackle the larger story arc and really lose yourself in a very productive way.
"Characters take on a life of their own and you become more of an observer than a creator," he says. "Your novel becomes something that is unfolding as it goes and I think that's one of the great joys of writing, this sense of being surprised by your own imagination."
Ironically, the idea of NaNoWriMo is likely to sound less absurd to successful writers than to dilettantes. To the ubiquitous party bore who merely talks about writing a novel, the romance of inspiration seems paramount. In real life, it's stamina that separates authors from talkers, a fact acknowledged by many of the published writers whose "pep talks" appear on the NaNoWriMo website.
This online base is a virtual gymnasium of motivational games, tips and resources, as well as a scoreboard for tallying individual and collective daily word counts. It's also the nerve centre of a vast global organism in the grip of an escalating fever. Baty expects 20,000 new novels to materialise this year, more through the brute force of chat-group peer pressure than any more mysterious process.
"By making novel writing a social activity you tap into a spirit of camaraderie, and you also have a sense of accountability which you don't have when you've gone off to a cave to toil alone for a couple of years," he says. "People are gonna ask how your novel is doing and that is invaluable in keeping you on track when the going gets tough."
Last Sunday, about 50 members of Melbourne's NaNoWriMo chapter threw a pre-season barbie in Middle Park. As is often the case in large groups of strangers in this town, the conversation was mostly related to scores and degrees of fitness.
There were howls of envy for Scarlett, who can write 50,000 words in a day and "regularly beats whole regions". There were oaths through gritted teeth to "crush" Sydney, Montana, Saskatchewan - and especially Edinburgh, UNESCO's first "City of Literature". Melbourne came second, in August. But not this month, if one circle of twentysomething geeks, gamers and goths can summon a combined word count to equal their enthusiasm.
"It's like playing tennis or any sort of sport," said Steph, who crossed the 50,000-word finishing line on her third attempt last year. "Just because you're not a world champion doesn't mean you can't have a go."
This was just a fraction of Melbourne's 850-strong NaNoWriMo community. The majority, perhaps less comfortable with the rough and tumble of chat-group face time, was no doubt home alone, brainstorming synopses and character bios in the solitary space that is every novelist's paradise and prison.
So far, more than 25 books begun during NaNoWriMo have ultimately found publishers. Canadian author Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants even topped the New York Times bestsellers list last year.
Admittedly, taken from a nine-year total of more than 50,000 completed manuscripts, this result vaguely recalls that uncomfortable aphorism about typing monkeys. In the plotless caffeine frenzy of week three, that kind of wisdom is likely to be the marathon writer's nemesis.
Don't think about Stanislaw J.Lec's cruel advice to fledgling writers: "Sometimes you just have to stop writing. Even before you begin." And it's definitely not worth dwelling on Truman Capote's withering riposte to Jack Kerouac: "That isn't writing, it's typing." Better to focus instead on more practical advice, such as Stephen King's adage that "any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word", and Kurt Vonnegut's first rule of creative writing: "Do not use semicolons ... all they do is show you've been to college."
CHRIS BATY HAS HEARD plenty of critics damning NaNoWriMo for "mocking the art form". He merely points out that novel writing has benefits to the individual imagination and sense of worth which have little to do with the publishing industry as we know it.
"For me, the success story is somebody who always loved books, who winds up finding something inside them that they didn't know was there. I get thousands of emails with that tale. People come away from this with this sense that, 'If I can write a book in a month, what else can I do?"'
Write another one, is the obvious answer. As the director and chief motivator of NaNoWriMo, Baty feels more pressure than most to knock off his 50,000 words every November. Of his nine completed manuscripts, four are "redeemable", he says. "That has been one of the surprising lessons for me, that you can write a reasonably unhorrible first draft in a month."
Stick that in your rulebook, budding novelists: "Forget masterpiece, aim for reasonably unhorrible." Then if you really want to bridge the gap, just add two words: second draft. That's what the other 11 months are for.
[The Age]
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Scenes from the Austin "Rocky" NaNoWriMo Write-In
Austin, Texas, wrimos proved they can go the distance with a mid-month NaNoWriMo write-in at Mt. Bonnell, the city's highest point. At the time of the write-in, the Austin group was the 18th highest grossing city in the nation with just over 300 writers posting word counts. A few of these stalwart wrimos took up writer and photographer Deanna Roy's personal challenge to run up Mt. Bonnell to the theme from the original Rocky and then have a write-in at the top.
In addition to adding to the city's collective word count, the write-in resulted in these striking photographs. Read her essay "Our Fingers Are Gonna Fly Now" for a full account of the invigorating morning, or see her work from last year's Nature Write-In.
[Ginny Wiehardt / About.com]
In addition to adding to the city's collective word count, the write-in resulted in these striking photographs. Read her essay "Our Fingers Are Gonna Fly Now" for a full account of the invigorating morning, or see her work from last year's Nature Write-In.
 |
| Up the steps to Mt. Bonnell for a NaNoWriMo write-in. |
[Ginny Wiehardt / About.com]
Monday, October 20, 2008
On your mark, get set, go write a novel
Think you can write a 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time?
Students, web designers, dentists and people all over central Illinois are gearing up for the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, challenge, which starts Nov. 1.
More than 140 people from the Greater Peoria Area have already signed on for the annual event, said local coordinator Cheri Nordstrom, a Metamora Township High School alum.
The Boston Globe reported that in 2007, more than 96,000 adults across 73 countries registered to start and finish a 50,000-word novel in 30 days as part of NaNoWriMo.
On its Web site, NaNoWriNo founder Chris Baty offers some tongue-in-cheek reasons for participating: "To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work."
For Rae Rein, a junior political science major at Illinois Wesleyan University who participated for the last two years, the event gave him a sense of accomplishment: "The two most important parts of writing are practice and finishing things," he said in an e-mail. "If you don't constantly write, you immediately lose the flow and the feel of the words, how they should fit together, how it all should sound when you read it back."
Mossville Grade School teacher Bryan Holmes thinks it's a great idea. For the second year, he has signed up all of the school's fourth-graders for the project. The students will do all their writing in school.
"They're going to write anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 words and they set their own individual targets. We did it last year, and it was a very exciting project," said Holmes, who also plans to write a novel in November.
Timm Gillick, a web designer from Washington, said he tried it last year and although he didn't complete his novel, "It was a lot of fun."
Jodie Slothower of Bloomington joined the Peoria group last year and enjoyed it so much she formed a group in Bloomington-Normal that met Wednesday night to launch its writing event.
The Peoria group is planning an entire day of writing to kick off this year's event. From midnight to 2 a.m. there will be an online write-in, where writers will meet in the group's chat lounge, on its MySpace page at myspace.com/peoriawrimos. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. the group will be writing at Apple's Bakery on Knoxville Avenue.
Nordstrom also is planning an evening pizza party with the coordinators of Kewanee and Bloomington/Normal.
"Obviously participation in any of the events is optional, but I imagine a few of us will be excited enough to attend all three," she said.
Anyone 13 or older can get involved with NaNoWriMo activities, even if they can't attend the group meetings. There is no cost. Once you've set up an account at nanowrimo.org, you can keep track of your word counts, join forums, get tips from others and discuss your progress.
[CATHARINE SCHAIDLE / The Journal Star]
Students, web designers, dentists and people all over central Illinois are gearing up for the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, challenge, which starts Nov. 1.
More than 140 people from the Greater Peoria Area have already signed on for the annual event, said local coordinator Cheri Nordstrom, a Metamora Township High School alum.
The Boston Globe reported that in 2007, more than 96,000 adults across 73 countries registered to start and finish a 50,000-word novel in 30 days as part of NaNoWriMo.
On its Web site, NaNoWriNo founder Chris Baty offers some tongue-in-cheek reasons for participating: "To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work."
For Rae Rein, a junior political science major at Illinois Wesleyan University who participated for the last two years, the event gave him a sense of accomplishment: "The two most important parts of writing are practice and finishing things," he said in an e-mail. "If you don't constantly write, you immediately lose the flow and the feel of the words, how they should fit together, how it all should sound when you read it back."
Mossville Grade School teacher Bryan Holmes thinks it's a great idea. For the second year, he has signed up all of the school's fourth-graders for the project. The students will do all their writing in school.
"They're going to write anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 words and they set their own individual targets. We did it last year, and it was a very exciting project," said Holmes, who also plans to write a novel in November.
Timm Gillick, a web designer from Washington, said he tried it last year and although he didn't complete his novel, "It was a lot of fun."
Jodie Slothower of Bloomington joined the Peoria group last year and enjoyed it so much she formed a group in Bloomington-Normal that met Wednesday night to launch its writing event.
The Peoria group is planning an entire day of writing to kick off this year's event. From midnight to 2 a.m. there will be an online write-in, where writers will meet in the group's chat lounge, on its MySpace page at myspace.com/peoriawrimos. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. the group will be writing at Apple's Bakery on Knoxville Avenue.
Nordstrom also is planning an evening pizza party with the coordinators of Kewanee and Bloomington/Normal.
"Obviously participation in any of the events is optional, but I imagine a few of us will be excited enough to attend all three," she said.
Anyone 13 or older can get involved with NaNoWriMo activities, even if they can't attend the group meetings. There is no cost. Once you've set up an account at nanowrimo.org, you can keep track of your word counts, join forums, get tips from others and discuss your progress.
[CATHARINE SCHAIDLE / The Journal Star]
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Novel concept: Aspiring authors sign up for madcap writing project
 |
| Ted Boone will be one of the Lawrence residents participating in National Novel Writing Month. Participants will attempt to write a 50,000-word novel during November, with encouragement and tips from the organization's Web site, www.nanowrimo.org, and from local writing meetings. |
"I think people can sit down and watch a television show and think, 'I could have written that,' or 'I would have written it better,'" Boone says. "And I think we do that with books, too. There's a temptation to compete with the creative forces that are out there."
With one recent study showing more than 80 percent of Americans would like to write a book, it's obviously a common goal for many.
So if you're one of those who wants your own novel, get your laptop fired up - National Novel Writing Month is just a couple of weeks away.
The annual event, which goes by the shorthand NaNoWriMo, is pretty straight-forward: Write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November, then upload it to www.nanowrimo.org. A computer will count your words, and if you hit the 50,000-word mark, you'll get a certificate.
"There's no magic here," says Chris Baty, a Prairie Village native who founded the event. "All we're doing is giving people a little bit of inspiration and a little structure."
Baty, who now lives in San Francisco, started the writing event in 1999 with a group of friends. They picked 50,000 words as an arbitrary number that seemed attainable but would still qualify as a short novel.
It's grown to include a nonprofit organization and more than 101,000 participants in 80 countries last year.
"We all have dozens of books in us," Baty says. "Sometimes people get caught up that they don't have THE idea, the book no one's ever written before, and it has to appear before they start writing. That idea I don't think ever comes. You just have to start writing."
'Not great words'
That's the way it was for Lawrence resident Sara Lundberg. She attempted to hit the 50,000-word mark twice before finally attaining it last year with a fantasy story.
"It's probably going to be crap," she says of most of the NaNoWriMo novels. "Thirty thousand of the 50,000 I wrote last year are not great words. There are gems in there, though, that are amazing, that I didn't know I could write."
That may be the case, but NaNoWriMo novelists have had some luck in the past. Baty says 27 manuscripts have been sold to publishers, and the event can now tout a New York Times best-seller: "Water for Elephants," by Sara Gruen.
The key, participants say, is not to worry about quality - just get words on paper.
Daunting?
Writing 50,000 words might sound like a difficult task.
But Boone, a lecturer in Kansas University's School of Business who serves as the Lawrence organizer for NaNoWriMo, says it's definitely attainable. He's done it three years, all with science fiction stories.
There are different strategies to getting through.
"For me what works is writing scene by scene," he says. "Some days, I'll write a chapter that's 3,000 words, which is a lot of output for a single day. The next day, I might write a single scene that's much shorter."
Others, he says, just try to get through 1,667 words a day, which puts them on pace to finish the novel by the end of the month.
And there are resources available. The organization's Web site, www.nanowrimo.org, has tips and also lists local write-ins that will happen in Lawrence in November.
At those writing events, NaNoWriMo participants can get inspiration from one another and bounce ideas off of other writers.
"It's a really interesting crowd in Lawrence," Boone says. "You'll get people in full goth gear and makeup, and people who are professors. It really grabs the spirit of NaNoWriMo. People who wouldn't usually rub elbows with one another see they have commonality."
'Life of its own'
If you want to participate and don't have an idea, don't fear. Boone says he often doesn't choose his topic until a day or two before Nov. 1. And even then, he doesn't have the whole thing mapped out.
"I usually find I've got a good starting point, a couple of way points in the middle I'd like to strike, and I know where I want to finish," he says. "In the process, they'll get to the point where they feel like they're not telling the story. Literally the story will take on a life of its own."
Lundberg, an administrative associate at KU, plans to write a story about vampires to fill her November writing fix. She starts getting excited about writing every year around this time.
And even if she never gets anything published, it's worth her time.
"If I could make writing my life, that would be amazing," she says. "But most of my writing I do for myself. The thought of sharing it with the world is scary. But maybe someday I'll write something that's significant enough and I think is good enough I'll want to share it."
[Terry Rombeck / Lawrence Journal-Word]
Friday, August 8, 2008
How to Start a Novel? Write the Whole Thing in a Month
Summary: Lynn Jacobs, a teacher–consultant with the Northern California Writing Project, leapt into National Novel Writing Month in 2007 to fulfill her lifelong dream of writing a novel. The experience informed not only her writing process, but her teaching as well.
Lynn Jacobs had always wanted to write a novel. Yet even though she was an accomplished writer and teacher of writing, she didn't know quite how to start the daunting task.
"I didn't know if you had to have the story all planned out first—if you should have a beginning, middle, and end already figured out," said Jacobs. "It seemed like you ought to, but writing fiction with an outline seems stilted to me. The discovery that unfolds as the writing happens is just so important."
Jacobs, who has been a teacher–consultant with the Northern California Writing Project since 1996 and is currently a member of NWP's English Language Learners Network leadership team, knows the writing process well. She has participated in several NWP writing retreats and has had her articles on teaching published in journals such as English Journal, California English, and the Oklahoma English Journal.
She's also been an avid journal writer nearly all of her life—writing on scraps of paper when she doesn't have her journal with her—and is the kind of person who's always looking for different ways to write. For example, she recently discovered Journler, software that acts as a daily notebook but connects the written word with other media, and has also experimented with a writing process through 100 Words—writing 100 words each day, no more, no less.
So Jacobs obviously has the passion, focus, and follow–through a novelist needs. Still, where to start—especially since she was tackling a new, heady genre?
Do you fill up a notebook with the back story of all of your characters? Buy a novel–writing software program? Thumb through the library stacks to research your story? Set up a spool of paper and type madly for days as Jack Kerouac did when he wrote On the Road?
Quantity, Not Quality
Fortunately, one day when Jacobs was surfing the Web, she discovered a website for something called National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short). Participants begin writing November 1, with the goal of writing a 175–page (50,000–word) novel by midnight, November 30—in a "fun, seat–of–your pants" way, as the NaNoWriMo website puts it. More than 100,000 soon–to–be novelists participated in 2007.
"I just got all excited about it and decided I'm going to do it, I'm just going to do it and see what happens," Jacobs said. "What did I have to lose?"
"I absolutely believe that everyone has a book in them," said NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty, stressing the word everyone. "The process of writing that book is one of life's great adventures. Everyone is a writer, a storyteller."
Baty believes that many would–be novelists suffer from "expectations that are ridiculously high because they use their favorite novels as their models."
"When you make it a matter of quantity rather than quality, you take that pressure off yourself," said Baty. "It's a psychological sleight of hand. By giving yourself permission to write crap, you turn off the inner editor that makes writing so miserable, and the writing process becomes fun. It needs to be fun to get through the first draft of a novel."
Truman Capote dismissed Kerouac's work with his flip remark, "That's not writing, that's typing"—but Baty would say that's the point.
"The curious thing about writing for quantity over quality is that you end up getting a lot of both. You get a lot of writing momentum, which feels great, and by forcing yourself to write so intensely, you can tap into these late–night, slap–happy worlds of intuition and improvisation that are off limits to you when you sit down to write the great American novel. We need more typists."
As much as Baty believes in fervent and furious "typing," he's also a proponent of revision—multiple revisions—emphasizing that the month is truly about churning out a first draft, not a finished product.
A Dreamy Process
Jacobs' novel is one she conjured about a dream seller, loosely inspired by Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne."
"She has a clothesline down by the river, and hangs wispy cloths on it," Jacobs explained. "People come and they put a donation in a pot and take down a cloth, and that's their dream. The cloth always goes back up on the clothesline the next morning, but no one can figure out where they went or how they got there."
The curious thing about writing for quantity over quality is that you end up getting a lot of both.
Although Jacobs didn't plan what she'd write each day, a novel that could have remained in an abstract fetal stage for perpetuity suddenly came to life. The setting appeared. Characters emerged and started to take shape.
"It was all in there," she said. "I didn't know what I was going to write, but I'd sit down and then read it as it came out on the screen. I began to trust the process more and more each day."
If Jacobs needed motivation or guidance, email pep talks from prominent authors such as Neil Gaiman or Sara Gruen (who actually started her best–selling novel Water for Elephants during one National Novel Writing Month) helped get her fingers back on the keyboard.
Also, she appreciated the tips from Baty's book No Plot? No Problem!, which provides week–by–week overviews and writing exercises. "He takes you through the process," she said. "It's good to have your hand held a little bit."
By the end of the month, Jacobs had not only figured out how to start a novel, but was getting deeper and deeper into the storyline. And now she also has an idea of things she needs to research, such as life on the Sacramento Delta, to take the story forward and add more depth and detail.
Taking It to the Classroom
Jacobs has always had her ELL students do a lot of writing. Before each school year, she loads up on spiral notebooks and pens so that her students can write at the beginning of each class.
National Novel Writing Month didn't teach her the writing process, but it has reinforced her ideas of its value, especially in the classroom. "You are not going to get it right the first time. The important thing is to write but not to get too attached to your words. One way for students to see that is to have them do a whole lot of writing."
Jacobs is also interested in NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program, a variant of the big event in November, during which teachers and students work together to set a "reasonable, but challenging" word count instead of the 50,000–word gold standard. In 2007, 18,000 young writers participated.
"Beyond writing, kids are learning project–completion skills," said Baty. "They learn that as long as you're disciplined, you can pull off this seemingly impossible thing."
Baty noted that the event can spark a lively competition among students as they try to top each others' word counts. "It's interesting when writing becomes more like kickball, and the person who writes the most wins. Kids really seem to respond to this healthy competition. Writing stops being a chore, and becomes something exciting."
The Young Writers Program provides plenty of supporting materials for free—such things as a word count chart for the classroom, achievement stickers, and certificates of completion.
"You don't have to know where you are going, you just have to go there, you have to start driving," Jacobs said. "That's really what National Novel Writing Month reinforced for me."
[Grant Faulkner / National Writing Project]
 |
| LYNN JACOBS |
"I didn't know if you had to have the story all planned out first—if you should have a beginning, middle, and end already figured out," said Jacobs. "It seemed like you ought to, but writing fiction with an outline seems stilted to me. The discovery that unfolds as the writing happens is just so important."
Jacobs, who has been a teacher–consultant with the Northern California Writing Project since 1996 and is currently a member of NWP's English Language Learners Network leadership team, knows the writing process well. She has participated in several NWP writing retreats and has had her articles on teaching published in journals such as English Journal, California English, and the Oklahoma English Journal.
She's also been an avid journal writer nearly all of her life—writing on scraps of paper when she doesn't have her journal with her—and is the kind of person who's always looking for different ways to write. For example, she recently discovered Journler, software that acts as a daily notebook but connects the written word with other media, and has also experimented with a writing process through 100 Words—writing 100 words each day, no more, no less.
So Jacobs obviously has the passion, focus, and follow–through a novelist needs. Still, where to start—especially since she was tackling a new, heady genre?
Do you fill up a notebook with the back story of all of your characters? Buy a novel–writing software program? Thumb through the library stacks to research your story? Set up a spool of paper and type madly for days as Jack Kerouac did when he wrote On the Road?
Quantity, Not Quality
Fortunately, one day when Jacobs was surfing the Web, she discovered a website for something called National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short). Participants begin writing November 1, with the goal of writing a 175–page (50,000–word) novel by midnight, November 30—in a "fun, seat–of–your pants" way, as the NaNoWriMo website puts it. More than 100,000 soon–to–be novelists participated in 2007.
"I just got all excited about it and decided I'm going to do it, I'm just going to do it and see what happens," Jacobs said. "What did I have to lose?"
"I absolutely believe that everyone has a book in them," said NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty, stressing the word everyone. "The process of writing that book is one of life's great adventures. Everyone is a writer, a storyteller."
Baty believes that many would–be novelists suffer from "expectations that are ridiculously high because they use their favorite novels as their models."
"When you make it a matter of quantity rather than quality, you take that pressure off yourself," said Baty. "It's a psychological sleight of hand. By giving yourself permission to write crap, you turn off the inner editor that makes writing so miserable, and the writing process becomes fun. It needs to be fun to get through the first draft of a novel."
Truman Capote dismissed Kerouac's work with his flip remark, "That's not writing, that's typing"—but Baty would say that's the point.
"The curious thing about writing for quantity over quality is that you end up getting a lot of both. You get a lot of writing momentum, which feels great, and by forcing yourself to write so intensely, you can tap into these late–night, slap–happy worlds of intuition and improvisation that are off limits to you when you sit down to write the great American novel. We need more typists."
As much as Baty believes in fervent and furious "typing," he's also a proponent of revision—multiple revisions—emphasizing that the month is truly about churning out a first draft, not a finished product.
A Dreamy Process
Jacobs' novel is one she conjured about a dream seller, loosely inspired by Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne."
"She has a clothesline down by the river, and hangs wispy cloths on it," Jacobs explained. "People come and they put a donation in a pot and take down a cloth, and that's their dream. The cloth always goes back up on the clothesline the next morning, but no one can figure out where they went or how they got there."
The curious thing about writing for quantity over quality is that you end up getting a lot of both.
Although Jacobs didn't plan what she'd write each day, a novel that could have remained in an abstract fetal stage for perpetuity suddenly came to life. The setting appeared. Characters emerged and started to take shape.
"It was all in there," she said. "I didn't know what I was going to write, but I'd sit down and then read it as it came out on the screen. I began to trust the process more and more each day."
If Jacobs needed motivation or guidance, email pep talks from prominent authors such as Neil Gaiman or Sara Gruen (who actually started her best–selling novel Water for Elephants during one National Novel Writing Month) helped get her fingers back on the keyboard.
Also, she appreciated the tips from Baty's book No Plot? No Problem!, which provides week–by–week overviews and writing exercises. "He takes you through the process," she said. "It's good to have your hand held a little bit."
By the end of the month, Jacobs had not only figured out how to start a novel, but was getting deeper and deeper into the storyline. And now she also has an idea of things she needs to research, such as life on the Sacramento Delta, to take the story forward and add more depth and detail.
Taking It to the Classroom
Jacobs has always had her ELL students do a lot of writing. Before each school year, she loads up on spiral notebooks and pens so that her students can write at the beginning of each class.
National Novel Writing Month didn't teach her the writing process, but it has reinforced her ideas of its value, especially in the classroom. "You are not going to get it right the first time. The important thing is to write but not to get too attached to your words. One way for students to see that is to have them do a whole lot of writing."
Jacobs is also interested in NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program, a variant of the big event in November, during which teachers and students work together to set a "reasonable, but challenging" word count instead of the 50,000–word gold standard. In 2007, 18,000 young writers participated.
"Beyond writing, kids are learning project–completion skills," said Baty. "They learn that as long as you're disciplined, you can pull off this seemingly impossible thing."
Baty noted that the event can spark a lively competition among students as they try to top each others' word counts. "It's interesting when writing becomes more like kickball, and the person who writes the most wins. Kids really seem to respond to this healthy competition. Writing stops being a chore, and becomes something exciting."
The Young Writers Program provides plenty of supporting materials for free—such things as a word count chart for the classroom, achievement stickers, and certificates of completion.
"You don't have to know where you are going, you just have to go there, you have to start driving," Jacobs said. "That's really what National Novel Writing Month reinforced for me."
[Grant Faulkner / National Writing Project]
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Fifty thousand words later: Junior participates in novel writing contest and lives to tell the tale
Well, it’s all over now. It’s been 30 days, 50,000 words and countless hours of sacrificed sleep, but my novel is finally done.
November was National Novel Writing Month – affectionately dubbed NaNoWriMo by its followers – where the goal is to complete a 50,000-word novel over the course of the month. The event originated eight years ago as a fun challenge between a group of friends in San Francisco, but since then it has ballooned into a phenomenon of approximately 100,000 people across the country. Generally, less than 20 percent of the novelist-wannabes actually reaches the 50K goal. I, I’m proud (and slightly astonished) to report, am one of them.
It was a gloriously stupid idea. What was I thinking anyway, tackling a novel in addition to a Williams workload, not to mention a host of extracurriculars? I’d made a pact with myself, though, that if I started turning into a hermit, or a grouch or a sleep-deprived zombie, I would quit right then and there. But it never reached that point, miraculously enough, and so I kept on writing.
I blame my family and friends for my perseverance, because they made NaNoWriMo fun. There were a bunch of entrymates attempting novels, so we made a word count bar graph for the common room, each person’s name below a bar to fill in as they completed every thousand words. A bonding activity. Other Williams students decided to write novels of their own, and while I was in awe of how many other slightly crazy, certainly determined, writing-inclined students existed here, somehow I was not surprised. Even my family joined in the merriment; my mom decided to write a novel herself, and we’d e-mail each other our word counts every night, along with motivational quotes and novel excerpts. As time went on, though, she needed more and more encouragement. My younger brothers made fun of her writing, and she made fun of her own writing as well. “You’re never going to make it to 50,000 with an attitude like that,” I informed her, and sure enough, she didn’t, dropping out after 10,000 (“But you keep going,” she urged me. “You can do it!”).
You can do it, you can do it, everyone told me. I wasn’t too sure. Fifty thousand words was mind-bogglingly gargantuan, the kind of quantity that’s hard to even wrap your head around. I calculated that to be on schedule, I’d have to write 1667 words every day. Instead, it was already day two before I even broke a thousand. I realized that if I really wanted to do this, I’d have to completely murder my inner editor, my inner critic, and my inner sense of sanity. And so I did. It was only then, when they were all lying in a bloody dog pile that I was able to type furiously, recklessly, writing things that I knew were ridiculous yet also knew I couldn’t afford to think through rationally or reasonably. There just wasn’t time.
After a week, I made the mistake of printing out my work-in-progress (at the time, only about eight single-spaced pages. Yes, I had already fallen dreadfully behind schedule). I read through it and was horrified. Flat dialogue, character inconsistencies, and an already overly confusing plot. Oy vey. Why was I wasting lord-knows-how-many hours on this story that was, effectively, a hunk of junk? But, bigger question: how could I possibly stop now? (There was that all-telling bar graph in the common room to consider…)
And so I barreled onward, spinning convoluted interwoven stories of obese tortoises, train hijackings, Bulgarian woodcarvers, Hal’s Unfortunate Tractor Incident, and – perhaps most frequently – hilarious and possibly incriminating anecdotes of my own family, under the guise of clever pseudonyms, of course. (“Hey, is this character supposed to be me?” asked my dad, after I e-mailed out an excerpt in which the father in the story is suffering from a bit of a baldness complex. “No, no,” I assure him. “That’s Mr. Bugle. This is a fictional piece of literature, Dad.”)
I soon discovered that NaNoWriMo writing is wonderfully liberating. There’s simply no time to search painstakingly for the perfect word or to stress over syntax (that’s what December is for). Instead, you can write freely, splattering sentences on the page in an explosion of exuberance. It’s such a different mentality from schoolwork, where you think carefully, draft an outline and then edit heavily to make your text crisp and clear before turning a paper in.
In contrast, the emphasis of NaNoWriMo is on quantity over quality. It’s not supposed to be a literary masterpiece right away. Rather, the idea is that from amidst all the rubble (and believe me, there’s a lot of it), a few gems will emerge. I can only imagine trying this on an English paper. “Sorry that the first few pages stink,” I would write on a little post-it note disclaimer, “but check out that gem on page four.”
Some people might approach novel writing as a solo endeavor; however, I learned that I worked most effectively when I involved as many people as possible. Everyone turned into my story fodder. I solicited countless ideas from friends, and I made my relatives role-play a few of the pivotal scenes over the Thanksgiving table. I’d send out e-mails, urging people to bombard me with “social pressure” to go write. I told scores of people that I was trying to write a novel, figuring that once the word was out, I wouldn’t be able to weasel my way out.
With this social pressure flowing free, I knew that I would meet the challenge. I did get just a little worried as the end of the month approached and I still had 10,000 words left to go, but I knew that I could always have one character read aloud from the Bible or Anna Karenina to take care of a couple thousand words. On the eve of November 30, I finally put my finishing touches on the novel, overlooking major plot inconsistencies to end it in a flash of drama, poignancy, vigor.
I’m not going to even think about this novel for the next two weeks. Some time after that, I may pull it out eventually and give it a good read-through, keeping my eyes peeled for gems. Maybe I’ll like it. The nice thing is, if I don’t, it’s only 11 months until I get to do this again.
[Elissa Brown / Williams Record]
November was National Novel Writing Month – affectionately dubbed NaNoWriMo by its followers – where the goal is to complete a 50,000-word novel over the course of the month. The event originated eight years ago as a fun challenge between a group of friends in San Francisco, but since then it has ballooned into a phenomenon of approximately 100,000 people across the country. Generally, less than 20 percent of the novelist-wannabes actually reaches the 50K goal. I, I’m proud (and slightly astonished) to report, am one of them.
It was a gloriously stupid idea. What was I thinking anyway, tackling a novel in addition to a Williams workload, not to mention a host of extracurriculars? I’d made a pact with myself, though, that if I started turning into a hermit, or a grouch or a sleep-deprived zombie, I would quit right then and there. But it never reached that point, miraculously enough, and so I kept on writing.
I blame my family and friends for my perseverance, because they made NaNoWriMo fun. There were a bunch of entrymates attempting novels, so we made a word count bar graph for the common room, each person’s name below a bar to fill in as they completed every thousand words. A bonding activity. Other Williams students decided to write novels of their own, and while I was in awe of how many other slightly crazy, certainly determined, writing-inclined students existed here, somehow I was not surprised. Even my family joined in the merriment; my mom decided to write a novel herself, and we’d e-mail each other our word counts every night, along with motivational quotes and novel excerpts. As time went on, though, she needed more and more encouragement. My younger brothers made fun of her writing, and she made fun of her own writing as well. “You’re never going to make it to 50,000 with an attitude like that,” I informed her, and sure enough, she didn’t, dropping out after 10,000 (“But you keep going,” she urged me. “You can do it!”).
You can do it, you can do it, everyone told me. I wasn’t too sure. Fifty thousand words was mind-bogglingly gargantuan, the kind of quantity that’s hard to even wrap your head around. I calculated that to be on schedule, I’d have to write 1667 words every day. Instead, it was already day two before I even broke a thousand. I realized that if I really wanted to do this, I’d have to completely murder my inner editor, my inner critic, and my inner sense of sanity. And so I did. It was only then, when they were all lying in a bloody dog pile that I was able to type furiously, recklessly, writing things that I knew were ridiculous yet also knew I couldn’t afford to think through rationally or reasonably. There just wasn’t time.
After a week, I made the mistake of printing out my work-in-progress (at the time, only about eight single-spaced pages. Yes, I had already fallen dreadfully behind schedule). I read through it and was horrified. Flat dialogue, character inconsistencies, and an already overly confusing plot. Oy vey. Why was I wasting lord-knows-how-many hours on this story that was, effectively, a hunk of junk? But, bigger question: how could I possibly stop now? (There was that all-telling bar graph in the common room to consider…)
And so I barreled onward, spinning convoluted interwoven stories of obese tortoises, train hijackings, Bulgarian woodcarvers, Hal’s Unfortunate Tractor Incident, and – perhaps most frequently – hilarious and possibly incriminating anecdotes of my own family, under the guise of clever pseudonyms, of course. (“Hey, is this character supposed to be me?” asked my dad, after I e-mailed out an excerpt in which the father in the story is suffering from a bit of a baldness complex. “No, no,” I assure him. “That’s Mr. Bugle. This is a fictional piece of literature, Dad.”)
I soon discovered that NaNoWriMo writing is wonderfully liberating. There’s simply no time to search painstakingly for the perfect word or to stress over syntax (that’s what December is for). Instead, you can write freely, splattering sentences on the page in an explosion of exuberance. It’s such a different mentality from schoolwork, where you think carefully, draft an outline and then edit heavily to make your text crisp and clear before turning a paper in.
In contrast, the emphasis of NaNoWriMo is on quantity over quality. It’s not supposed to be a literary masterpiece right away. Rather, the idea is that from amidst all the rubble (and believe me, there’s a lot of it), a few gems will emerge. I can only imagine trying this on an English paper. “Sorry that the first few pages stink,” I would write on a little post-it note disclaimer, “but check out that gem on page four.”
Some people might approach novel writing as a solo endeavor; however, I learned that I worked most effectively when I involved as many people as possible. Everyone turned into my story fodder. I solicited countless ideas from friends, and I made my relatives role-play a few of the pivotal scenes over the Thanksgiving table. I’d send out e-mails, urging people to bombard me with “social pressure” to go write. I told scores of people that I was trying to write a novel, figuring that once the word was out, I wouldn’t be able to weasel my way out.
With this social pressure flowing free, I knew that I would meet the challenge. I did get just a little worried as the end of the month approached and I still had 10,000 words left to go, but I knew that I could always have one character read aloud from the Bible or Anna Karenina to take care of a couple thousand words. On the eve of November 30, I finally put my finishing touches on the novel, overlooking major plot inconsistencies to end it in a flash of drama, poignancy, vigor.
I’m not going to even think about this novel for the next two weeks. Some time after that, I may pull it out eventually and give it a good read-through, keeping my eyes peeled for gems. Maybe I’ll like it. The nice thing is, if I don’t, it’s only 11 months until I get to do this again.
[Elissa Brown / Williams Record]
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