November means Thanksgiving. It means skipping Wednesday classes the University refuses to cancel. And it means returning home to gorge on as much turkey, stuffing and fresh-baked pie as possible (while being extremely thankful for Mom's cooking, of course).
But for a minority, November has come to mean something radically different than football and turkey bastings. To a select committed few, November is National Novel Writing Month.
In 1999, a group of 21 friends each attempted to write a 50,000 word novel within 30 days. During the past eight years, their experiment has grown to include 40,000 writers. The experience affectionately referred to as "NaNoWriMo" is now led by a non-profit by the name of the Office of Letters and Light. A mere six days into November 2006, the collective word-count of the participants in their annual novel-writing extravaganza is already nearing 200 million.
NaNoWriMo is a strange phenomenon. Even its founders thought writing a novel in a month would be tedious and painstaking. But NaNoWriMo has unwittingly stumbled upon a formula for success.
College and Nursing senior Victoria Solly has written her own novella, On Top of the Forest, and knows firsthand how hard it is to finish a novel. Along with her completed work are two unfinished projects.
She explained that the biggest difference between her finished project and her unfinished works was the presence of a deadline. Her novel was a "term paper" for a class she was taking on HIV. Her lecturer, Carole Vincent, encouraged her to take advantage of her love of writing and to write an accurate novel dealing with HIV.
The presence of a deadline is the first motivating factor that makes NaNoWriMo so effective.
College sophomore Louisa Aviles is currently engaged in her second NaNoWriMo attempt. This year, she is writing about a physicist who receives the Nobel Prize, only to find out that he is legally dead and cannot accept it. While blatantly admitting that she has no idea what a Nobel Prize ceremony is like (her novel makes it into an Oscars-like event), she also admitted that it doesn't matter because she'd probably never write a novel outside of NaNoWriMo anyway. She likes the idea that it has to be over by the end of November because it keeps her "regimented."
The second effective aspect of NaNoWriMo is the entertainment factor. At its best - especially for a student - and at its least stressful, writing should be fun. Solly called writing her "me time," replacing time online or at the gym. Colleen Puma, an English major from Northeastern University, said that, during her first go-around, NaNoWriMo took the place of television as well as the occasional Friday-night party.
If writing was a replacement, good; it would be replacing other forms of entertainment (although some NaNoWriMo veterans will tell you it replaces sleep and schoolwork as well). And that's part of the fun.
Aviles said it "kick-starts you creatively." Colleen's justification was even simpler: "I enjoy writing."
In talking to short-term novelists, it never seemed to fail that NaNoWriMo itself had become a story. For Puma, it was the day her hard drive crashed and had to be erased, 21,000 words into her first novel. Aviles rolled her eyes when asked if NaNoWriMo had provided any memories. She proceeded to launch into a tale about a NaNoWriMo event she attended during Thanksgiving break. There, sitting on big couches amid "mood lighting," people as young as 12 to "60-year-old cynical women" all typed furiously on laptops.
NaNoWriMo is not an isolated endeavor - from the beginning, it was social. It started with a group of friends trying to write and now, as a non-profit organization, encourages the same thing.
That plays out in different ways. Some continuously send out updates to listserv or use their a MySpace.com accounts to post and critique clips of novels.
NaNoWriMo is a social activity.
Whether the potential novelists are attracted by the deadline, the entertainment or the friendships, be forewarned: NaNoWriMo is addictive. The only thing harder than finding someone who's made it to 50,000 words is finding someone who's only tried once.
So maybe when next November rolls around, you can curl up with your laptop and a turkey leg and try to write. If you do it for no other reason, do it because, as Aviles put it, we "don't write enough . and this is as good of an excuse as any."
Stephen Danley is a College senior from Germantown, Md. His e-mail address is danley@dailypennsylvanian.com. Late Night Conversation appears on Fridays.
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