| National Novel Writing Month | | Date Created: Oct 17, 2004, 02:43 PM |
 November is National Novel Writing Month. It also goes by the short name of NaNoWriMo (pronounced nah-know-WRY-moe). Once upon a time in 1999, a guy in the States decided it would be kind of fun to try to write a novel. He probably reckoned that about 2000 words a day would be stretching but not unreasonable pace, which meant a rough 50,000-word draft in a month. To help himself keep motivated, he got a bunch of his friends to try to do the same feat in the same month. There were 21 of them in the first year, but the second year, they opened it up via a website and 140 people signed up. November is the month for writing, but you can sign up (but not start) in October. So far this year (year 6), about 36,000 have signed up. |
| I've only barely managed to talk myself out of it. Everything about it appeals to me: the focus on process rather than product; the mystical experience of doing something that thousands of other people are doing at the same time; and of course, trying my hand at longer fiction as a break from non-fiction (though some of my colleagues regard my exegesis as straddling the boundary already). I really want to do it and probably will some year. But not this year. Chances are I'll have to rush respond to the copy-editor on MHM40 during November and I really should make a good start on the Paul book this term while my teaching load is light. I entertained the notion of inviting you all to take a stab with me at writing a spiritual non-fiction book in a month (NaNONWriMo? Naspi Wrimo?) but one of the understandings of NaNoWriMo is that even the successful entrants are mostly writing rubbish, and that's not something I'm willing to aim at nor motivate others to aim at. |
| If you're interested in this kind of thing, another month-commitment site is "100 words". It started in 2001, independent of NaNoWriMo. Again it was a guy who got a group of friends together, determined to write. Only this guy decided on a more zen goal: the writing could be of any genre and about anything but you committed yourself to writing precisely 100 words, no more and no less, each day for 100 days. He since decided that 100 days was too long and now it happens each month (regardless of how many days are in the month). If you manage to write exactly 100 each day for the month you sign up for, the series are published on his web-site (not something NaNoWriMo offers). I've done it a few times -- spent one month in 2003 using this discipline, exploring and noodling around with ideas for the section of MHM40 on the spirituality of Jesus. |
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