BOOKISHGAL

We’re all stark raving bonkers, of course. All the thousands of us who engage in the NaNoWriMo exercise every November, in which we try to write a 50,000 word novel (novella, really), between midnight the morning of November 1st and midnight the night of November 30th.

“NaNoWriMo” stands for “National Novel Writing Month,” and it’s been going for several years, expanding each year with more people participating, in more and more countries around the world. Many of them register (or attempt to) at the official site, NaNoWriMo.org, and on the odd occasion when the site functions, keep track of their daily and total word counts, add buddies and watch their word counts, post and read excerpts from the ongoing novels, and so on. There are word challenges between cities, regular emailed pep talks from established writers (my favourite last year was from Neil Gaiman), discussion threads for overcoming writer’s block or getting help with a quick burst of needed research, oh, everything you could want, when the site actually works.

Why do we do it in the first place, though?

Somewhere around mid-month, we all tend to wonder the same thing ourselves. In order to reach the 50,000-word goal, we have to average 1,667 words per day. For people who don’t write a lot - or people who, you know, have actual lives - that’s a lot of words every day. But we love it. We love piling up that verbiage, plowing through, setting ourselves the challenge, seeing if we really, really can do it. That’s the real goal - just to prove we can do it.

Much of the time, the actual story isn’t that great. Or rather, the story might be good, but since the word count is the primary thing this month, the story may be cluttered with lots and lots of extra, unnecessary verbiage. If you do it every year, you quickly learn all the tricks for padding the word count, believe me. Never say in five words what you can expand to twenty - not in November, at least.

One of the most fun things about doing the NaNo is the community. I’m posting with several friends who are doing it on two different discussion forums, and we all urge each other on and report our progress to each other. Several people on my friends list at LiveJournal are also doing it. People create icons that say things like “Food and Sleep are Privileges during November” or “Bring on the Carpal Tunnel!” They create decorative calendars that tell you how many words you should have reached every day. There’s a Flickr NaNo Group, a Facebook, a MySpace - well, you get the idea.

It’s a nutty thing to do, there’s no doubt about it. I have a pattern (which I’m furiously hoping to break this year) of only succeeding in odd-numbered years. Still, I’ve been successful three times, and I still love going back and reading the stories. One of them was a sequel of a previous one, and I have another sequel already planned for NaNo 2009.

There is just nothing like typing away that last day, watching the clock as you get closer and closer, then finally (hurray!) finishing, and turning your manuscript into a text file that you feed into the official site’s word counter for confirmation. When it agrees that you’ve reached at least 50,000 words, it sends you to a site where you can get a certificate and several official decorative icons that say “Winner!” You can’t imagine how gratifying it is to grab those icons, and be able to post with them for a few weeks after it’s over. Such a small prize for so much effort, but you feel like you’ve won an Olympic gold medal.

It’s a great thing to do. If you haven’t tried it yet - you’ve only got 29 days left!!

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