NANAWRIMO

Have you ever felt inspired to just sit down and write? Did you ever have the desire to write a novel, a masterpiece, a work of grand design? Well, you’re in luck. Happy National Novel Writing Month! November is the month of the Nanowrimo craze, when 400,000 participants across 200 countries race to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, starting from November 1 at 12:00am to November 30 at 11:59pm. What the novel is like, what genre the novel is, whether the novel is just a piece of junk doesn’t matter. The only goal is to get to 50,000; in other words, you have official permission to word vomit over your computer and still be declared a novelist. “Quantity over quality” as they say. At least 1 of those 50,000 words of sheer perseverance has got to be the most creative thing you’ve ever written. But “The experience itself is pretty awful,” says Zach Schiffman, AHS student and a 3-time winner of the Nanowrimo challenge (’11-’13), “Writing that much on a slow day can take up to two and a half hours. It's tiring, and sometimes you just run out of ideas.” By doing the math, getting to 50,000 in 30 days requires a minimum rate of 1,667 words a day, the equivalent of about 3 pages in Microsoft Word single-spaced. To reach the finish line and be declared a winner (and by winning you receive bragging rights and a certificate saying you just achieved the impossible) seems daunting. Yet every one of those participants has plowed through obstacles no matter what, and has succeeded through pure hard work and in true grit. “But sometimes you have moments of brilliance,” Zach adds, “Some mornings you just wake up and you immediately think to yourself, ‘I know what I’m going to write today!’ And you have that thought in your head all day and you can’t wait until that night when you sit down in front of the computer and write your little heart out.” By making participants pledge to finish in a set amount of time, Nanowrimo forces writers, from young inexperienced middle-schoolers to fully-fledged high school English teachers, to set aside time to just write—something you may have wished to do for a long time. Zach told me, “On November 30th, you get to look back at what you've done in the past month. No matter how bad it is, no matter how many plotholes there are, no matter how many grammar mistakes you've made, you're looking at a book that you just wrote. And it feels pretty awesome.”