Novel for Novel's Sake: WTF is NaNoWriMo?

The event is organised through the site www.nanowrimo.org, ran by non-profit Canadian organisation Office of Letters and Light. It started in 1999 with just 21 participants and last year had more than 100,000, so is doing pretty well for itself.

Basically you sign up with the site and on the 1^st of November you start writing that 175-page paperback of yours. You can update your word count on your profile during the month and when/if you reach the 50k mark you upload your whole novel and win the enviable prize of a sense of achievement and an online certificate. So why should you bother?

The whole point of the exercise is freeing yourself from creative restraints and the need to constantly edit and improve your work. A lot of us feel any creative writing needs to be honed and perfected with the same time and diligence our graded essays require. And it's true, works of literary genius do require a lot of time and editing - a daunting fact which puts most of us off.

NaNoWriMo is your chance to just spam out those words without agonising over every sentence. With only one month (and other commitments to eat up your time), you don't have time to edit. You focus on the goal of 50k and just write without looking back, not caring whether you are creating absolute trash. Chances are you will.

You will make grammatical mistakes and develop characters oddly and your plot will be all over the show. But what does it matter? For after only a month you can show off to all your friends and relatives (and anyone else who will listen) that you have written a whole novel! You will have accomplished a feat to be proud of and learnt more about yourself along the way. And who knows? Maybe you will stumble upon literary gold you would never have created otherwise.

There are no restrictions on the genre you write - comedy, romance or experimental literary near-future science fiction; it's only the word count and your own sense of achievement that matter. Think everything on the bestsellers list is trashy and even you could write better? Prove it.

You won't be alone in your task. The site links you to other writers so you can compare your progress to them, as well as engaging in a lot of healthy debate on the process of novel writing. You can upload excerpts of your novel so others can read them and give you feedback, and you can read and critique the works of other people as well.

For me one of the most fascinating aspects is the rare chance to glimpse how other people go about writing fiction - do they plan out every detail in advance or write organically? Where do they find inspiration for their plots/characters/settings? What time of day do they write, and how - sitting at a computer or a coffee shop, with music or total silence? You get to discuss all these topics through the forums as well as watching their novel grow.

There's also the option to connect up with others in your region. You can talk through regional forums and organise times to meet up in person. Though better yet would be if you got a group of your friends to sign up with you and had some friendly competition to spur you on.

And you can dispel fears of your work being plagiarised - when you've finished your 50k+ word manuscript and submitted it to the site for word count verification, no-one reads it. It's checked by automated bots and all submissions are deleted soon after verification. It's also recommended that you scramble your final product before submission - you're shown how to substitute letters so the novel you submit is goblygook and worthless to thieves. You don't even have to submit excerpts if you don't want to! You could copy and paste a single word 50,000 times over and still be praised for finishing. But where's the fun in that?

The November 30^th deadline coincides nicely with the end of semester so you can write trash to your heart's content without fear of messing up assignments. And there are plenty of people and forums offering support and advice to help you through the task - who knows, the friends you make through NaNoWriMo might become dearer to you than those on Facebook!

Some gems of advice are ‘don't be afraid to write trash' and ‘leave editing until December'. My own is to write what you know -it's been noted that first novels are almost always autobiographical. First-time writers find it easiest to draw upon their own lives for inspiration - reinterpreting people, events and settings from their lives in an artistic way.

And that is what I am doing. My story shall be called ‘Plastic on Concrete' and will be about a skateboarder who lives in Auckland city. That is the extent of my planning. I am looking forward to November when words will flow from my fingertips and this story will burgeon like the flowers in spring.

My username is Rosey_Kim and I'll be updating regularly with word counts and plot excerpts during the month of November, so you can check my progress anytime. Or better yet - join the challenge and we can compare scores.

So if you have ever considered writing a novel but haven't the time or ability, embrace November as your month to shine and head over to www.nanowrimo.org to participate in this (possibly) life-changing challenge.