You Want Me to Write a WHAT?

A novel.

Yep, you heard me, I want you to write a novel. Don’t look behind you, I mean you.

And not just that, I want you to write it in a month.

I know, you have all kinds of excuses why you can’t pos­si­bly. So do I. And all of them are legit­i­mate and seri­ous. (Well, OK, most of them.)

Which is why I’m going to do some­thing utterly ridicu­lous: I’m going to take my own advice. I’m par­tic­i­pat­ing in this year’s NaNoW­riMo, oth­er­wise known as National Novel Writ­ing Month. The chal­lenge is to write at least 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.

Can’t be done, you say? Well, in its first year, 21 peo­ple gave it a try, and 6 of them won. “Win­ning” NaNoW­riMo has noth­ing to do with writ­ing a bet­ter novel than Char­lie Sheen. It’s sim­ply the accom­plish­ment of reach­ing the word-​​count goal, and while your text has to be val­i­dated at the project web­site in order for you to be an offi­cial win­ner, the whole thing is essen­tially on the honor sys­tem. If you copy 50,000 words from Wikipedia and paste it into the val­ida­tor, no one will know you cheated but you.

But that’s kind of the point. This isn’t about writ­ing the great­est novel ever. It’s not even about get­ting pub­lished (though some NaNoW­riMo nov­els do). It’s sim­ply about the accom­plish­ment. And last year, over 200,000 peo­ple from around the world par­tic­i­pated in the event, with 37,500 reach­ing the goal.

So why am I doing this? And why do I think you should too? The most impor­tant rea­son is, “Just because.” But I do have a cou­ple others.

1. Writ­ing is learn­ing. When I write, I learn about the topic I’m writ­ing, and I learn about myself. Things come out in my words that I had no idea were inside me. I am often amazed when I go back to some­thing I wrote a long time ago. Many times I don’t even rec­og­nize the lan­guage or vocabulary.
2. Writ­ing is liv­ing. Life, I believe, is ulti­mately all about rela­tion­ships. And rela­tion­ships are built on com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I’m lim­ited in the num­ber of peo­ple with whom I can com­mu­ni­cate verbally—writing extends my reach and my vision to con­nect me with peo­ple who I would oth­er­wise never know about.

So why write a novel? Can’t I just start with a short story? Or maybe a sen­tence fragment?

I can’t answer that ques­tion for you. I do know for me, part of it is so I can say I did it. Part of it is that I real­ized that unless I just sit down and do it, it will never get done. And the absurdly ridicu­lous dead­line is going to make me pour out the words and not worry about how good it is. Which, by the way, is one heck of a good rea­son you ought to not only do this your­self, but encour­age your stu­dents to do it. But that’s another blog post.

For now, I’m count­ing down to mid­night, when I can start writ­ing, and get a cou­ple hun­dred words under my belt and finally get this story out of my head and onto the computer.

I hope you’ll join me. If you do, add me as a writ­ing buddy. And I’ll see you at the fin­ish line on Novem­ber 30.