NaNoWriMo stands for “National Novel Writing Month.” It began in 1999, when founder Chris Baty and a group of likeminded friends first pegged November as the month in question and set out to pen 50,000 words in 30 days. As of last year, according to the NaNoWriMo.org website, over 200,000 people participated and 30,000 of them completed 50,000 or more words by the November 30th deadline.
What Are the Rules?
The rules are simple. You write your first word on November 1st and keep going until November 30th. If you reach the 50,000-word mark by the 30th (on average, that’s 1,667 words per day), then congratulations: you’re a NaNoWriMo winner!
Why Participate?
The NaNoWriMo website (which is due for an exciting renovation this year) provides tools for your to track your word count progress and communicate with and derive support from other participants through its forums. Local groups often organize “Write-Ins” where they arrange to meet in a particular venue to toil on their word counts together.
Beyond these tools and activities, your participation in NaNoWriMo is really up to you. There’s no editor (outside of your own head!) who will draw red lines through your sentences and make you rewrite them. No webmaster or forum moderator is going to look through what you’ve written and make sure that the words you enter into the word counter tell a story or even make sense. What NaNoWriMo gives you is an excuse to sit down and write, a month-long clarity of purpose in which you can breathe life into that story idea that has been niggling at the back of your brain for years on end. It gives you permission to suck in your first attempt — as Hemingway said (and is proven true often enough), “The first draft of anything is shit” — so that you have room to complete it, and, eventually, go back and refine it. It allows you to prove to the harshest critic of all — yourself — that the novel you’ve always said you’d write can, in fact, be written. And it allows you to do all this in an environment where thousands of others are toiling in unison with you, all across the globe.
My First NaNoWrimo Experience
My participation in NaNoWriMo began in November 2008, but I first learned of it in the previous year from Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing podcast. NaNoWriMo wasn’t my first experience writing a novel, as I had taken a year between college and law school — what I think of as my “fourth year” of college, as AP credits allowed me to graduate in three — to write the rough draft of my first novel, which I’ll be referring to here on Fictional Matters as Book One. But that 130,000+ word draft had literally taken me the whole year to complete, so the notion of writing 50,000 words in 30 days was still daunting to me. On top of all of that, I was in my third year of law school, which meant I was juggling classes and responsibilities as a law review editor, teaching assistant, and research assistant at the same time. It really didn’t make much sense to add NaNoWriMo to my already overflowing plate, but I did it anyway.
I did it as a way to show myself and my friends how serious I was about fiction writing. I did it in order to prove that I still could write fiction after two and a half years of law school and legal writing. I also did it as a partial rebellion against the traditional lawyer’s career path that I had placed myself on, an acknowledgement that I’d be taking a different direction after graduation. It was grueling, but I succeeded in reaching 50,000 at the eleventh hour on November 30th, and doing it in a way that didn’t compromise my law school responsibilities, as I managed to ace that semester’s classes (and AmJuring, or getting the top grade in, my favorite class and area of law, Intellectual Property Law).
And I've been at it every year since then.
Your (Future) NaNoWriMo Experience(s)
If you’ve ever thought about writing a novel but talked yourself out of it, got too busy or simply never got around to it, you owe it to yourself (and your unwritten novel) to give it a try. The experience will open your eyes to the possibilities of what you can achieve if you only dedicate the necessary time and resources. Even if you’ve never contemplated writing a novel before, if you’re in for a potentially life-changing experience or just looking to try something new, give it a go. If you decide to, there’s a whole community of others who will try along with you, and support you in this journey. For my part, I’ll be following up with advice on how to get prepared for NaNoWriMo, some tools and strategies, and a day-by-day update of my own progress this November.
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