For many of us, writing a novel is a lifelong dream we never seem to
find the time to accomplish. But over a thousand Chicagoans, including
students at a South Side high school, are determined to make that dream
a reality. And they're going to do it all in the span of a single month.
F. Scott Fitzgerald spent eight years writing Tender Is the
Night. Finnegans Wake took James Joyce seventeen years to
complete. But this November, some Chicagoans are joining a
global community of writers trying to finish novels in just 30 days as
part of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo started
in 1999 as a challenge among a group of friends in the San Francisco
Bay Area. They found that writing a novel in a month was a
lot more do-able than they'd expected, so they decided to try it every
year. The event has grown from 21 participants in its first
year to 79,000 people from around the world.
SAM: National Novel Writing Month kick-off party - 'I'm Sam,
this is my first year…Okay, cool, I'm not the only one!'
Here in Chicago, NaNoWriMo participants meet throughout
November at gatherings like these. Both first-time novelists
and veteran writers, like Michael Goldman and Sarah Condic, bounce
ideas off each other and offer tips learned from previous years about
how to reach the official goal of 50,000 words.
GOLDMAN: Well, I started all purple prose everywhere, and then
around chapter 2, I realized - I've written a thousand words in four
days, I really gotta speed this up. And then it's like -'Tom
said this, then she responded to Tom saying this!'
CONDIC: I replace all the contractions -'it's' is
now 'it is.' You will never find a contraction in my
novel.
The rules of National Novel Writing Month are
simple. To win, you must write at least 50,000 words between
midnight on November 1st and 11:59 pm on November 30th. You
can outline and plan ahead, but you can't write a word of prose until
the beginning of the month. Each day in November, novelists
upload their most recent draft to the NaNoWriMo website, and the site
then automatically detects and charts their word counts. It's
not just adults who are getting into National Novel Writing Month.
RUSHEK: You're going to take an orange piece of construction
paper, and you're going to write in the center a bubble diagram - My
Novel - and then all of the ideas you could possibly do.
When Kelli Rushek heard about NaNoWriMo last year, she
immediately thought it'd be a great opportunity for the Writers
Workshop class she teaches at Corliss High School on the South
Side. But it turned out the school didn't have the technology
for the project.
RUSHEK: There weren't enough computers in the school for me to
do it for the whole month. So, I brought it up to my kids
last year and they were actually very excited about it. And
then, when we weren't able to do it, they were kind of upset.
Then, earlier this year, she won a contest sponsored by the
NaNoWriMo office to receive 25 laptop computers for use in the
classroom. Two days before November began, Rushek surprised
her students with the announcement that each of them would be writing a
novel. Students like Allen Wallace and Kiera Torrey reacted
with a mix of excitement and trepidation.
WALLACE: I was a bit shocked when she told us about it cause
it came out of nowhere. She said the minimum was 50,000, and
I kinda choked on my breath or something. But I'm going to do
it anyway, because I like the challenge.
TORREY: I think it's gonna be fun. I'll get to see
how far I can push myself and how much I can actually write.
I think I might reach my goal, I don't know. If I reach it,
I'd be happy. I might cry.
Allen and Kiera's teacher Kelli Rushek is confident that her
students will make it to the finish line. They're motivated
by the competitiveness that high-schoolers are famous
for.
RUSHEK: So, there's going to be the student vs. student - "I'm
at this many words, how many are you at?" And then there's
the class vs. class. If period one is reaching their goal
more quickly than period five - it's amazing what a pizza party will
do.
To make the process as stress-free as possible for her
students, she's letting them choose a word goal they feel is
appropriate. She's also telling them not to let worries about
grammatical errors get in the way of their creativity, as might happen
in their other English classes.
RUSHEK: They might have had a teacher that said, 'Oh, you have
to have a comma here, you have to have a period here. Your
subjects and verbs don't agree.'
BATY: In some ways, it really should be called
National First Draft of a Novel Writing Month.
Chris Baty, founder of National Novel Writing Month, agrees
that simply writing anything is more important than worrying about the
quality of the writing.
BATY: The lesson that I've learned from this is that you can
edit a bad first draft into a good novel, but you really can't edit a
blank page into anything but a blank page.
For most people, finding the time and inspiration to write
even that first draft isn't easy, but Baty thinks that what you gain is
worth the trouble.
BATY: You do come away from it feeling, "Wow! If I
could write an okay book in a month, what else can I do?"
That tends to be kind of the start of a lot more other kinds of
adventures in people's lives.
And those adventures might just provide the plot for your next
novel.