National Novel Writing Month or Are You Out of Your Mind??

Dust off those pages, pull up a chair, November is National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. The goal is a 50,000 word manuscript by November 30th. That’s a mere 1666 words per day for thirty days. Trollope wrote 3000 words per day. George Simon could write TWO Inspector Maigret mysteries in a month. But for most of us one-page, 300-words-per-day mortals, the idea of writing 5 plus pages every day for a month is daunting, to say the very least. To help you along, Seven Bridge Writers’ Collaborative and Thayer Memorial Library are hosting hours on Mondays and Fridays for the month of November, when intrepid writers can gather at the library to work alone together, feeding off each other’s creative energy and their determination to meet this worthy, if not slightly masochistic, goal.  

NaNoWriMo began in 1999 the brainstorm of a few San Francisco Bay area writers, who, in their words, wanted to write novels for the same dumb reasons twenty-somethings start bands. Because we wanted to make noise. Because we didn’t have anything better to do. And because we thought that, as novelists, we would have an easier time getting dates than we did as non-novelists. For more information on the storied (sorry) history of this remarkable idea, check out their web site, where you will also find links to a multitude of support, including writer’s forums and tools for tracking your progress.  Information on scheduling of local events can be found here.

Come Write In at the Thayer Memorial Library on Mondays, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm, and Fridays from 6:00 – 8:00 pm. 

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

― Ernest Hemingway

Hollis Shore