National Novel Writing Month is Upon Us Again

I've been doing this whole college student thing for nearly three years now, and I've tried pretty much every procrastinative trick there is to try: everything from your basic television watching (I Love the 80s marathons on VH1 being my drug of choice), to battling a Snood addiction, to spending an hour coming up with the perfect song quote to match my mood.As fun and successful in preventing actual work as these practices are, nothing beats what I consider to be the ultimate excuse for putting off work: National Novel Writing Month. That's right, there's actually a month dedicated to the art of novel writing and it officially begins at midnight on Halloween (November first).

National Novel Writing Month isn't like those other holidays teachers tell you about in elementary school; National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short) doesn't just want to inspire observance, it wants to inspire action. As you might have already deduced, to properly observe NaNoWriMo, one must write a novel (defined as a piece of fiction 50,000 words in length) over the course of the month of November.

According to their website (www.nanowrimo.org), "NaNoWriMo is all about the magical power of deadlines. Give someone a goal and a goal-minded community and miracles are bound to happen. Pies will be eaten at amazing rates. Alfalfa will be harvested like never before. And novels will be written in a month."

Writing a 50,000 word novel in one month on top of a full college course load cannot be done, you say? Well, I'd say you have little faith in the will power of a true procrastinator. It can be done because I've done it. Twice. I found out about NaNoWriMo freshman year from a friend who passed along the website address and the promise that we could battle the 50,000 word beast together.

I went through a romance novel phase during my senior year of high school and had previously created what I considered the perfect title for a romance novel: Engorged Hearts Burning With Desire. (In close second, a title all you Civil War buffs will probably enjoy: Unconditional Surrender with romantic leads named Grant and Lee). So, with only a ludicrous title and the exciting prospect of total creative freedom, I began my initiation into the world of novel writing.

I don't even need to finish telling you about my novel for you to surmise, given the time restrictions and the god-awful title, that my first attempt at novel writing would result in 50,000 words of crap. It had no plot, no character development, random pirate musical numbers, and hokey sex scenes that went on for far too long.

It also included every paper and short story I had written for a class that year. Okay, so perhaps that was cheating, but when I realized I was only 1/5 of the way through my novel during Thanksgiving break, drastic measures had to be taken. I just gave my characters remarkable memory and abused the copy/paste function on my laptop.

If you know it's only going to be 50,000 words of crap why bother? you might ask. The organizers of NaNoWriMo attack this question with a three-point response: