November is a month of excess and excitement: election day, meteor showers, Thanksgiving, black Friday, and extreme feats of writing. That last one may not ring a bell for everyone, but for tens of thousands of people around the world, November is National Novel Writing Month, or, for expediency’s sake, NaNoWriMo. It’s a month-long writing challenge put on by a non-profit in Oakland, in which participants write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days, ignoring their inner editors and focusing on quantity instead of quality. It’s also a month full of social events, writing challenges, and plenty of goading from novel-writing peers.
I visited a write-in at a coffee shop in Walnut Creek earlier this month, where about a dozen novelists gathered to offer each other support and also check in on one another’s word counts. Here are excerpts from a few of the authors.
Erika Oglesby is working on a science fiction story for young adults. These are the opening lines.
This is the fourth year Chris Williams is writing a manuscript for NaNoWriMo. Listen to a brief excerpt.
