It’s a known fact in the writing world that to write, edit, and perfect an entire novel can take months, even years, to complete. Just coming up with a plot and story elements can take weeks. Authors worry themselves with piles of work and are told to take their time on it. However, contrary to this advice, every November, writers with extra confidence and who want to push and challenge themselves embark on the National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo.
What is NaNoWriMo?
NaNoWriMo is an exciting event that encourages authors to write a whole novel during the 30 days of November. This writing challenge is difficult and nerve-wracking for all writers who participate. It begins on November 1st and concludes on the 30th. Participants will be encouraged to write a 50,000 word novel during this time, with edits made and critiques followed. This challenge doesn’t focus on perfection or necessarily the quality of your novel, but on the quantity or how much you were able to write. Its goal is to cure common writing obstacles, such as writer’s block and perfectionism, which many authors struggle with. Writer’s block is when an author or writer comes to a stop in the road and can’t think of what to write next. Perfectionism is something that not only affects tired authors, but also many normal people all around the world. It’s a hard thing to overcome, and many people aren’t able to get rid of it.
NaNoWriMo is such a difficult challenge, so much so that people have participated in it over 4,000,000 times, but only a scarce 20% of those people have actually completed it. This takes hard work, dedication, and a lot of free time. It makes sense that many would give up, finish their novel later, or stop writing it altogether. Even though it’s hard to complete, it’s even harder to give up.
The History of This Writing Endeavor:
NaNoWriMo was started just in 1999 by an author by the name of Chris Baty. He was a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area, and after getting a bad case of writer’s block, he decided to write a whole novel within one month. This month, however, was July and stayed that way until the next year, moving it to November “to more fully take advantage of the miserable weather.” Baty then dragged his friends and colleagues into this challenge, which accounts for it having only 21 participants the first year, with only 6 of them achieving the end goal. Although the second year jumped ahead and had 140 writers partake in the challenge, we now know of over 4,000,000 people joining the scheme. This led the creators to give the authors access to a NaNoWriMo website, complete with progress bars for your word count and discussion boards for the writers to communicate on how their novel is going.
The End Product!
Now that it’s clear how many people participated in the challenge, there must have been quite a few books published. And indeed there was! Over 250 novels written by NaNoWriMo authors were traditionally published to the world. Some of these books even became best-selling novels! This included:
- The Night Circus- Erin Morgenstern
- Water For Elephants- Sara Gruen
- The Beautiful Land- Alan Averill
- Cinder- Marissa Meyer
