So, NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month. You’ve learned your first term about the upcoming month in last week’s post. But there’s a lot more to it than a vague outline, especially when glancing over at the NaNoWriMo website and wondering what the hell you may be in for.
50,000 words in 30 days, usually over the month of November. This project has been around since 1999, and although it started out tiny and local, it has bloomed into a full nonprofit with almost a million worldwide active participants. And it’s growing every year.
It is taught in classrooms, there are poetry, scriptwriting, and songwriting months, there is merch, there are integrations with various apps, and there are some really neat perks to participating in NaNo (as it’s called, shortened) by their sponsors. Even more neat things if you win.
The website itself has a lot to offer, perhaps overwhelmingly so to those just dipping their toes in, but it can be separated into some pretty easy categories.
You sign up and you get your own profile. It’s not egotistical to admit that this is the place you will likely be visiting the most during your stay; it’s where your super cool author stats are, after all. NaNo uses a word counter, accessible anywhere on the site, to update your wordcount throughout November. But on your profile page, there are your Writing Buddies (a friend system, like any social media site has), a basic bio section you can fill out, and the fun part: stats.
Writers may not like doing number things, but they sure as hell love looking at graphs and bars and visible signs of their progress.
There is an overall progress chart, complete with reference line showing where you ought to be to stay on par, and word count per day chart so you can compare the best days to the worst days.
On November 25th, the site opens up validation so you can “win”, though you could have passed the 50k mark by then. In the past, you would copy/paste your manuscript into a counter—they would not save anything, and encouraged encryption for those who wanted it—but now it operates on an honor system.
More importantly, this means you get access to winner goodies! There are plenty of participating partners for those who join NaNo, even if they do not win, even if they write 2 words in 30 days, but getting that Winner badge ups the sweet deals. Most of them are writing-related, of course. My favorites are always the deals—up to 50% off in many cases—on writing programs. (More on those, later.)
Now, for the last, biggest part to touch on: the forums.
They aren’t as common in the big social media sites anymore, but forums are message boards organized by topic where anyone with an account can post. The NaNoWriMo forums are a thing of wonder. There are social boards, organized by age group, genre, type of writer, area, and more. There are boards dedicated to site news, updates, participant goodies, and, again, more.
The really cool boards are sort of writing adjacent, in my opinion. There are topics dedicated to graphic designers making mock book covers (I froth at the mouth in excitement, and have asked for them several times in the past), sharing playlists, lists of procrastination options, or places to do specific research.
My favorites are the boards dedicated to actual writing, however, and usually those relating to the genres I write in. (I usually haunt the Supernatural, Horror, and LGBTQ+ areas, though I’m pretty lax at posting once November hits.) There are character adoptions, plot prompts, WIP exchanges, and, possibly another favorite of mine: the ability to post a question and have people help, should they be able to.
Communities like NaNoWriMo are about helping each other. It can lead to a sort of crowdsourced research mill. Few people claim to be true experts, but what are writers if not quasi-experts in everything? And if nothing else, access to a lot of people with different lived experiences is pretty handy.
There are also NaNo-specific inside jokes, of a sort, referenced last week. I may be dating myself here, because I do not use the forums as much anymore so can’t keep up with the hip trends and new kids on the block, but two that I’ll always remember are Mr. Ian Woon and the traveling shovel (of death).
Need a character to pop up for a specific purpose but not important enough to flesh out or give thought to? Or are you just braindead at naming yet another character? Welcome Mr. Ian Woon. The name is an anagram of NaNoWriMo, and he is whoever you want him to be. It is just a name to throw out if you are pressed for imagination and really need one. (There are also character adoptions available, for people giving up OCs they’ve never used or picking one from the pile to toss into their manuscript.)
The traveling shovel (of death) is sort of a similar thing; you use it if you’re pressed for something to happen. Few authors actually kill characters with shovels—although yours truly has that dubious distinction—but the shovel can do more than kill, of course. It’s like that old writing adage: if you’re stuck in a scene, have a man walk in with a gun. Certainly changes things, doesn’t it?
NaNoWriMo is a hectic rush job, aimed at getting words on paper. This is not meant to create a perfect manuscript from day 1. You may not even have a completed project by the end of it. But you can’t fix what isn’t existing, so you need to get some sort of first draft out there before you can polish it into something spectacular. Don’t worry about getting it right—just get it written.
