And Then...

...there was that time I wrote a novel in 30 days. No, really. I did. I've been aware of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as it's better known, for years. I've never participated because I've always had an excuse about being too busy, or already in the middle of a project, or some other lame rationalization. So I decided this year was different; it was time to jump in and see what would happen.

For those unfamiliar with the project that became an international event, NaNoWriMo challenges writers of every skill level to write a 50,000 word first draft in 30 days. That's an average of 1667 words per day. And the less prepared you are, the better. The idea is to experience seat-of-your-pants-style creative writing. The very idea of which can make a perfectionist break out in hives, but I jumped in anyway, with an idea that didn't begin to take shape until about the middle of October. So I actually sat down to write a novel, without an outline and with a very vague idea of who the main characters were, in a month. And an amazing thing happened: the less I worried about sentence structure, finding the exact right word, knowing what would happen next, and how I'd get out of the corner I'd just written myself into, the story started flowing, the characters revealed who they were and the plot unfolded.

Freelance writer Chris Baty started NaNoWriMo in the Bay Area in July of 1999 with 21 participants. In 2000, it was moved to November, "to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather." Last year, over 400,000 participants labored over their keyboards and made something out of nothing. They conjured words out of thin air, coaxed characters out of their imaginations, created worlds and wrote novels. The Young Writer's Program, which started in 2004, is a writing workshop for K-12 students. Each year, more than 100,000 students and educators in over 2,000 classrooms around the world have participated. How cool is that? For those who've asked me what's next, the only thing I'm sure of is more writing.

Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month