November is a wonderful month. November, for many people, stands for turkey and Black Friday. I also stands for the beginning of the cold and the end of fall. For many others, it's stands for NaNoWriMo. If I'm right (and I usually am), most of you have never heard of NaNoWriMo. The elongated form is National Novel Writing Month, and as you can guess, it takes place in November. This is an annual creative-writing project that is based online.
NaNoWriMo is an organization that recruits people with one very specific purpose in mind: to write an entire novel in the month of November. Got that? The entire purpose of this is to write an entire novel (that's 50K words) in a month. Five. Thousand. Words. In. One. Month. To put that number in perspective, that's how many words are in the Great Gatsby. Once I got over the shock of that number, I took the logical choice of action. Of course, that would be to sign up online.
Before I started writing, I got some background info first. What makes NaNoWriMo so appealing to many aspiring writers is that there are no rules. According to them: "If you believe you're writing a novel, we believe you're writing a novel too." This started in 1999 with only 21 members at its start. By 2010, NaNo had grown enough that over 20K people signed up and 2,872,682,109 words were written that year. Tons of authors have gotten published after participating: Water for Elephants, The Night Circus, and Anna and the French Kiss (to name a few). Now in its thirteenth year, over 60K young writers are participating. Their total word count for 2012 is 905,205,247 (by the time you read this, it will have probably gone up a couple thousand or million).
So far so good, but my word count is only at a measly 834 words. (Then again, I did only start writing about an hour ago...) According to to the helpful applet that is on their website, to reach the target of 50K words by midnight on the 30th, I will need to write 2,048 words per day. Guess I better start writing.
(again, to put numbers in perspective, this blog was 374 words)
NaNoWriMo is an organization that recruits people with one very specific purpose in mind: to write an entire novel in the month of November. Got that? The entire purpose of this is to write an entire novel (that's 50K words) in a month. Five. Thousand. Words. In. One. Month. To put that number in perspective, that's how many words are in the Great Gatsby. Once I got over the shock of that number, I took the logical choice of action. Of course, that would be to sign up online.
Before I started writing, I got some background info first. What makes NaNoWriMo so appealing to many aspiring writers is that there are no rules. According to them: "If you believe you're writing a novel, we believe you're writing a novel too." This started in 1999 with only 21 members at its start. By 2010, NaNo had grown enough that over 20K people signed up and 2,872,682,109 words were written that year. Tons of authors have gotten published after participating: Water for Elephants, The Night Circus, and Anna and the French Kiss (to name a few). Now in its thirteenth year, over 60K young writers are participating. Their total word count for 2012 is 905,205,247 (by the time you read this, it will have probably gone up a couple thousand or million).
So far so good, but my word count is only at a measly 834 words. (Then again, I did only start writing about an hour ago...) According to to the helpful applet that is on their website, to reach the target of 50K words by midnight on the 30th, I will need to write 2,048 words per day. Guess I better start writing.
(again, to put numbers in perspective, this blog was 374 words)
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