Novels in November
“Um, is there an event here tonight?” I mumbled to the woman behind the counter at Starbucks, not sure if I had come across the correct coffee shop among the countless options in Cobble Hill. She looked puzzled. Self-conscious about the way I decided to spend my Thursday night while my friends opted for a concert, I slunk away to the basement of the store and found what I was looking for: a group of mismatched people sitting together, typing fiercely on sticker-barraged laptops. This was it: my introduction into the intense, strange world of NaNoWriMo.
While some traditionalists prefer to call the month after October “November,” an ambitious movement of aspiring writers and novelists refer to the month by the moniker NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month. Founded in 1999 by Chris Baty, the annual creative writing project, run through a nonprofit called The Office of Letters and Light, began with just 21 participants and has since grown to more than 200,000 in 60 countries.
NaNoWriMo challenges these 200,000 to one simple task: write a 50,000-word novel in one month. The novel must be started from scratch, and written only by one person. The definition of “novel,” however, is not too exacting. “If you consider the book you’re writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!” the website encourages.
Candace Cunard, an intern at OLL, is a seven-time NaNoWriMo participant and is currently a first year Ph.D. student at Columbia. She participated in the challenge throughout her years in college, which she says helped keep her grounded. “It is something that is purely fun, but no one will ever grade. It was doing what I want, and not what the professor wants.”
I lost cell phone service as soon as I entered the Starbucks. Unsure of what would happen as I approached, a heavily bearded man wearing a TeeFury “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” T-shirt, gave me a smile. “Is this the Write-In?” I asked nervously. After some encouraging nods, I sat down at the table with the bearded man, along with an Orthodox Jew, a 20-something woman with a blue-and-blonde mohawk, and a middle-aged woman sporting a NaNoWriMo sweatshirt.
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