30-Day Novelists

National Novel Writing Month participants hard at work (starting closest from left to right) Dawn Casey, Trini Quiroz, Mary Shire, Bob Newell, Jeremiah Payer and Greg Bone

National Novel Writing Month participants hard at work (starting closest from left to right) Dawn Casey, Trini Quiroz, Mary Shire, Bob Newell, Jeremiah Payer and Greg Bone BODIE COLLINS PHOTO

Right when it hit midnight on Oct. 31, Tony Pisculli settled down at an all-night coffee shop, opened his laptop and got to work crafting the first lines of his new novel – what he describes as “Die Hard in a strip club.”

It may have been Halloween, but more importantly for Pisculli and the handful of others working alongside him that night, it was now Nov. 1. And for them – and hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country – Nov. 1 means the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

NaNoWriMo was launched in 1999 in San Francisco “accidentally” – as founder Chris Baty, now a freelance writer and Stanford professor, tells it – with a group of 21 writer friends. It was, simply, just a way for them to have fun, and partly, Baty has stated, because they had nothing else to do.

“I think the scene – full of smack-talk and muffin crumbs on our keyboards – would have rightly horrified professional writers,” Baty recounts on the NaNoWriMo website. “We had taken the cloistered, agonized novel-writing process and transformed it into something that was half literary marathon and half block party.”

The event has been attracting nearly 350,000 writers annually – all of whom attempt the official NaNoWriMo challenge: start and finish 50,000 words in 30 days (about 1,667 per day). These days, even calling it National Novel Writing Month is something of a misnomer: The event has expanded to include hundreds of cities around the world on six continents. And NaNoWriMo has become its own nonprofit that also hosts writing programs throughout the year and has garnered support from professional authors who encourage participants via the online forum.

At least 250 NaNoWriMo writers have been published – and that’s just in the traditional sense, not counting self-publishing. Books started from NaNoWriMo include novel-turned-film Water for Elephants and New York Times bestseller The Night Circus. Some of these writers will look at websites such as Printivity to help make physical copies of their books to help distribute.

Elaborating on his “Die Hard in a strip club” concept, Pisculli explains that it centers on a girl who’s asked to be the best “man” for a friend – a friend for whom she happens to be harboring a longstanding, unrequited crush. “She is determined to throw him the wildest bachelor party ever at a strip club,” Pisculli explains. “And then, of course, it gets taken over by terrorists.

“It’s a little ridiculous,” he says with a laugh, “but it is fun.”

And that – ridiculous yet fun – in many ways, also is an apt way to describe NaNoWriMo as a whole. It’s ridiculous in the sense that it’s a substantial, daunting undertaking to write a novel in 30 days. Yet the event continues to grow and many participants return each year. And while participants seem to take a certain pride in being a part of the same event that has bred a significant amount of now-published, and even a handful of now-famous, writers, that’s not necessarily the goal. The real purpose, as Oahu’s NaNoWriMo volunteer municipal liaison Mary Shire puts it, is “mostly just writing for the joy of writing.”

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A GROUP EFFORT

By the first Sunday of November, Shire – who this year, is working on a time-travel odyssey set in the time of King Henry VIII – already was behind her goal word count. Shire is a full-time English teacher at Aiea Intermediate School and a part-time teacher for an online program, and her already busy schedule was complicated by trips and visiting friends. It had been hard for her to find the time.

That, participants say, is where the NaNoWriMo structure really is useful.

“It forces me to make time: There are events and I go and write,” says Shire. “And I will write, and not take out my papers to grade or lesson plan or surf the Internet.”

The Oahu NaNoWriMo community is a diverse one. It’s comprised of 624 members – about 200 of whom Shire says are actively working on a novel this year -from a range of backgrounds: college students, military personnel, retirees, stay-at-home parents and scientists. The group is comparatively modest when looking at cities like Seattle and Los Angeles that have upwards of 16,000 members, but it’s a tight-knit one. Regulars meet a couple times a week to write together. There is even a smaller group that meets monthly throughout the year – to plan for November, to talk about writing, and mainly just to hang out. The local community that has sprouted up around the event seems to be a big pull for many of the participants.

“Writing can be a very solitary life. You tend to lock yourself away and plug away on a story,” says Ray Dean, who has been writing with NaNoWriMo for the last nine years. “When I sit down at a write-in, it’s just kind of that group energy that gets you in the mood. It’s very much a group cheer session. And that is the neat part – it gives a social aspect to somewhat of a solitary activity.”

And it’s not only the local community; the support extends from the online community, too.

“You get on the website and you have thousands and thousands of people from all around the world saying you can write this novel, you can do it,” says Emily Roberts, an editor who’s working on a sci-fi novel. “If you feel like you have a novel inside you, this is the perfect opportunity to get it out.”

SUCCESS STORIES

Dean had been writing as long as she can remember – mostly historical fiction and science fiction – but it turned out that NaNoWriMo was the push she needed to get published. Her work has since appeared in various anthologies.

Bob Newell had loved writing as a high school student, but after that, the hobby got pushed to the wayside by college, his career as an electrical engineer, and, well, life. But when he retired, he began participating in NaNoWriMo and now is working on self-publishing two of his resulting works.

Pisculli is a producer and director – notably of Hawaii Shakespeare Festival – and has been in theater for more than 20 years. But throughout all that time, he had a pet project on the side: an 80-page document full of notes on characters and potential plot lines that he would add to periodically.

“It was just like, ‘Oh yeah this will be great for the book, when I write it, someday, if that day ever comes.’

“Which is ridiculous,” he adds after a beat. “Why didn’t I just sit down and write it sooner?”

After he completed a novel his first year with NaNoWriMo – which he says is still sitting in a drawer somewhere – the experience prompted him to go back to school, and he recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from University of Southern Maine. He now has a revised, edited manuscript and is trying to find a publisher.

“It is already in the process of being rejected by many, many people,” he jokes.

THE FIRST DRAFT

On the third weekend in November, about a dozen NaNoWriMo writers gathered for something of a sprint within the marathon – it was a 12-plus-hour writing session that began at Paina Cafe, their usual Saturday spot, paused for dinner, and then continued into the night at Kissaten Coffee Bar. Dubbed their Day of Writing With Aloha, it was an important push for many participants, and this late in the month, it can be a make-it-or-break-it moment.

Finishing is, of course, an accomplishment in itself, but when Nov. 30 comes around, even if they’ve got their word count, it’s not over. To make the word count, you have to write constantly – and fairly quickly.

“If you are writing 50,000 words in a month, they are not going to be the highest quality of words,” Shire admits. “It is about getting that first draft out and then going from there.”

“There is something really liberating about that – and I think that is kind of the ethos of NaNo – to just let it flow,” Pisculli says. “And there is something kind of magical that happens when you do that.”

There is no time, participants say, to go back and edit or to second-guess the story – and there will be, they warn, moments when the story inevitably diverges from your plan and, perhaps like anything else, a dark hour where you question everything. The solution? Just to keep going, they say.

“At the beginning, it is so exciting – there is so much potential, and so you’re just dancing along, envisioning how great it is going to be, and about midway through, you are like, ‘No, it’s not what I imagined at all, this is terrible, why am I doing this?'” Pisculli says. “There is that moment of despair that happens midway through – and then, you push through that.”