A novel concept for USU’s writing fanatics
It’s a chilly fall afternoon when the group trails into the bookstore, one by one. Laptops in hand, they take to one corner of the store where the smell of dark coffee hangs heavily in the air. Even though he’s never met anybody in the group, Justin Glauser immediately takes the lead.
“Where do we want to meet?” he asks the half-dozen writers around him.
Glauser is part of a group of more than 200,000 people around the world who spend the month of November trying to write a 50,000 word novel.
Officially called National Novel Writing Month, or more commonly known as NaNoWriMo, the month-long word spree had it’s beginnings in San Francisco in July 1991. According to it’s website, NaNoWriMo started with 21 participants, six of those finishing an entire novel.
“Our July noveling binge had little to do with any ambitions we might have harbored on the literary front,” said founder Chris Baty, on the group’s website history. “Nor did it reflect any hopes we had about tapping more fully into our creative selves. No, we wanted to write novels for the same dumb reasons twenty-somethings start bands. Because we wanted to make noise.”
Glauser’s fourth attempt at NaNoWriMo starts this year. He said he tried and failed for two years, finally finishing a full novel last year.
He said he accidentally stumbled across NaNoWriMo one day at Borders, when he was looking for a book on plot and happened to see Baty’s book.
“I wanted to write a book, and I told myself, ‘I need to find a book about plotting and structuring a book that isn’t like these other books,'” Glauser said. “I saw ‘No Plot, No Problem’ and was like, ‘I don’t have a plot, character or setting, so this should really help me out.'”
Although the idea of writing more than 1,600 words per day may be daunting, Glausner said: “Just do it.”
“I think the whole spirit of NaNoWriMo is the law of exuberant imperfection,” he said. “It says to make something truly lasting, you have to risk making something horribly crappy. In reality, it’s one of the easiest things you can do. You pick up a notebook and a pencil, and you’ve got all the tools you need.”
Unlike other Internet-based competitions, NaNoWriMo offers no incentive to finish. It is completely self-driven. For writer Kayla Parnin, writing a novel in 30 days presents a unique challenge, but it also allows her to adhere to deadlines that she wouldn’t otherwise set for herself.
“I’ve done it both ways, and I feel I do better under pressure,” Parnin said . “If I don’t have a deadline, I get writer’s block horrifically bad, and I stop for months before I continue. If I do it in one month, it’s like I got to keep chugging, chugging, chugging, until I get there.”
Unlike most others in the group, Parnin is a NaNoWriMo veteran. She said this year will mark her seventh year of participation.
Parnin said she heard about NaNoWriMo in seventh grade, when her English teacher offered 500 points extra credit and an automatic A, if anybody in the class would complete a novel.
Along with Parnin, nearly 40,000 K-12 students now participate in NaNoWriMo, according to the website.
Group member Katie Larson said she hopes to be published in the near future, but in the meantime she’s just focused on getting through the month.
For her second year of NaNoWriMo, she’s working on a fantasy novel based on a few characters who each have a superhuman power. She said one of her only problems is her inability to decide how old her protagonist is.
“My characters are driving me insane,” she said.
Larson said NaNoWriMo is more than just a goal. She said it’s who she is.
“It’s not a hobby, it’s a lifestyle,” Larson said.
– allee.evensen@aggiemail.usu.edu