NaNoWriMo - which I shorten further, to Wrimo - began in the Bay Area in the late 90s as a challenge among a few friends. They dared each other to write a novel in the short space of a month. It could be any genre. It could be the worst writing ever set to paper, or the best thing since Shakespeare. Quality was immaterial. The main thing was quantity: each person had to write fifty thousand words of new, original material during that thirty day period.
Using that premise, Wrimo has since snowballed into a worldwide phenomenon. The creative folks who run NaNoWriMo keep the excitement of writing alive throughout the year with a variety of challenges for participants, including Script Frenzy (writing a script or a play in a month) and a summer camp-themed event in August where participants are assigned 'cabin mates' to act as mutual prompters and cheerleaders, urging each other on to their individual goals.
The Wrimo website is supported by sales of Wrimo related merchandise and participant donations. Proceeds go to keeping their servers from crashing, yes, but the biggest chunk of their annual intake goes to programs that support literacy and writers, particularly young writers.
I've only 'won' - crossed the 50K word mark before 11:59pm November 30th - one time. I've come oh-so-very-close on several other occasions, most notably 2012, when the clock ran out and left me about four thousand words short. The 46,000 words I did get in were written over the course of about ten scattered, frantic days, so I felt like a winner regardless.
I've never approached November noveling the same way twice. There have been years when I've meticulously outlined what I planned to write in advance, only to abandon the plan and go an entirely different direction come 12:01am on November 1st. There have been years when the word count was the only thing worth keeping: the words themselves added up to incoherent nothingness. Other times I've started the month with no idea what to write and ended up with some pretty decent material.
Some years I swore I wouldn’t participate. Not enough time. No desire to put myself through it again. Always, though, like an addict falling off the wagon, I find myself signing up at the last minute and scribbling frantically to make up for lost time.
Why can’t I give it up and have a normal, quiet November, a November that's free of stress over whether I’m writing 1,667 words per day? There are two main reasons:
1) Wrimo has been one of the few constants. My life has been unpredictable and unsettled over the past decade. I haven't always known where I'll be living, what I'll be doing, or what transformation/transition I’ll be in the midst of at any given time. Yet I always know that wherever I am come November, I can unpack my laptop, dive into the lives of my characters, and immerse myself in their worlds for a while.
2) The characters I write about won’t let me stop. I’ve been writing about the same basic group of characters for almost the entire time I’ve been participating in Wrimo (a couple of them even pre-date Wrimo). Every time I think I’ve started a new project with an entirely new cast, one of them eventually rounds a corner and runs into, or ends up being related to, a character from one of the other novels. At this point they’re more intertwined than the characters in a long-running soap opera. Unraveling ten years’ worth of entanglements, carving out story lines that are coherent and easy to follow - these tasks I keep pushing off, telling myself ‘next year’ every year.
I do think about and work on these novels throughout the rest of the year, largely because the characters refuse to stay silent. They poke and prod their way into my consciousness at odd hours, arguing with decisions I’ve made on their behalf or whispering suggestions in my ear, options to get them into or out of the situations they’re in. They get progressively louder as the first of November rolls around. So I have to write about them, or they’ll never let me rest.
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| Poster from 2005. Courtesy of nanowrimo.org. |
Ultimately, I liken the writing I do during National Novel Writing Month to my love of travel for travel’s sake. It isn't about surpassing milestones or rushing to a destination just to say I've been there. Making the time focus so intently on writing, each November, is like going for a ramble through the woods or setting off on an impromptu road trip, with plenty of stops along the way to take in the scenery and examine the flora and fauna. I have a destination in mind, yes. I’ll get there, someday. In the meantime, there is the pleasure of banishing my inner critic for a month every year, and the joyous process of seeing where my muses - and my characters - take me.
