National Novel Writing Month: A Five-Year Veteran’s View
November is almost here, which means for tens of thousands of people spanning the globe the time has come to crunch numbers over thirty days to maximize their ability to write at least fifty thousands words of a novel. It is called National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and by this point most of you with any connection to the world of books — whether writing, reading, wholesaling, or propping up the couch — have heard of this social creative writing event. In fact, I expect “NaNoWriMo” and “WriMos” to enter the Oxford American Dictionary within a few years.
Three years ago, I wrote a lengthy post explaining NaNoWriMo and why I started doing it; if you want a longer explanation from a participant about what the month entails, check out that hoary article. Or you can look at the official site. Last year, I again offered my evolving thoughts on NaNoWriMo.
This is my fifth year participating, and although the event started in 1999, a five-year vet such as myself is a rarity. The first time I did NaNo, the Los Angeles TGIO Party (“Thank the Gods It’s Over”) managed to pack all the attendees around a single table in the Cat and Fiddle pub in Hollywood. Half a decade later, the Kick-Off party for Los Angeles jammed wall to wall half of an El Cholo restaurant in Pasadena, standing-room only, with raffles for sponsored gifts and two professional writing gurus in attendance. The growth of the event over half a decade has been enormous, with at least four times as many participants as when I started, and that’s my conservative estimate.
As NaNoWriMo has changed, so has my relationship with it: my feelings about its public face, and how it become more globalized and systematized while losing some of its “handmade” origins. It’s natural that I would start to develop more cynical opinions about the event, but then I acknowledge that some of this comes from how much I’ve changed as an author since 2008 — and that NaNoWriMo played a big part in making those changes.
