November is National Novel Writing Month
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Nov. 13, 2010, New York Times.
November is National Novel Writing Month. Perhaps you know that already. Perhaps you’re trying to reach word 23,338 by night’s end. If you don’t know NaNoWriMo, think of it as a literary marathon with nearly 200,000 mostly amateur writers. The goal? To write a 50,000-word “novel” in 30 days.
“Novel,” in NaNoWriMo-speak, means “laughably awful yet lengthy prose.” What began in 1999 with 21 friends has grown into a nonprofit called the Office of Letters and Light, whose purpose is to get people to throw their literary inhibitions aside, work within a communal deadline, and have fun.
This enormous coterie of writers had produced nearly a billion words as of a couple of days ago. (In 2009, the total was nearly 2.5 billion.) At the end of the month, writers upload their work for a word count. Last year, slightly more than 19 percent of NaNoWriMo writers won, which proves just how hard it is to keep up a pace of 1,667 words a day, even if they’re laughably awful.