NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH
By Jay de Leon

November is National Novel Writing Month, known by its acronym NaNoWriMo.  This is actually a nationwide contest, and the goal of the event or the contest is to write a novel in thirty (30) days, or the month of November.  By all accounts, this contest has become gargantuan, frenzied, cultish and is probably now part of the American literary landscape.

You can google this event, as there are dozens of articles on it.  It is a very interesting phenomenon, well at least to would-be novelists, writers, journalists, bloggers and other types of wordsmiths around. 

To describe the event or contest briefly, your novel has to be at least 50,000 words.  My calculator shows that is an average of 1,667 words a day.  That is not formidable for a wordsmith, but don’t forget, you are writing a novel.  You will need, well, a story.  You will need plot, characters, locations, sub-plots, interesting twists and turns, some historical red herring ala-Da Vinci Code, etc.

But wait, there is a kicker.  The goal of the contest is just to finish a novel.  It is really more about quantity than quality.  The whole idea is for would-be or budding novelists to get that novel out.  Your novel may be raw, disjointed, unedited, even incoherent and unintelligible, but if it is in novel form, and the words total to at least 50,000, congratulations, you have written your first novel.

The final kicker is that anybody who is able to finish a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month is a winner.  Nobody will even judge your work.  I doubt if anybody would even want to read your work.   

This year, I seriously considered entering the contest, or participating.  On one hand, it would definitely be a challenge.  Since I fancy myself a writer, and feel I can churn out a better best-seller than those pap being regurgitated by Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, I want to see if I have it in me, if I have the discipline, imagination and intestinal fortitude to grind out almost 2,000 words a day and come up with a novel in 30 days. 

The biggest negative is the whole rationale of the exercise.  What in tarnation will I do with the finished product?  Some people go to Kinko’s, have their novel bound and put it on a shelf as a trophy or reminder that they did it, like climbing Mt. Everest. 

Do I go back and edit my manuscript, and really try to produce a best-selling novel out of it?  That is already one month out of my whole life that I had to invest in this exercise.  I will probably spend the rest of my life making heads of tails of what I wrote. 

Well, I will give myself one year to mull this over, and maybe consider next year’s contest.  Is it cheating if I start outlining and researching my novel now?  Will it be unfair advantage if at least I starting thinking of my opening line?  How about this one, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

I like that one so much I might try to join the contest this year.  I am now stoked.  Excuse me while I start thinking of the second sentence.