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Sunday, November 14, 2010

The Myth of the Lonely Writer - More on NaNoWriMo


On 8 Nov 2010, I posted an out-of-the-norm view RE NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writers Month) on my Writers Thought for the Day Blog.

Tonight I'm posting more prestigious poop on the NaNoWriMo on this blog.

This editorial from The New York Times Opinion Pages:

Word After Word After Word

November is National Novel Writing Month. Perhaps you know that already. Perhaps you’re trying to reach word 23,338 by night’s end. If you don’t know NaNoWriMo, think of it as a literary marathon with nearly 200,000 mostly amateur writers. The goal? To write a 50,000-word “novel” in 30 days.

“Novel,” in NaNoWriMo-speak, means “laughably awful yet lengthy prose.” What began in 1999 with 21 friends has grown into a nonprofit called the Office of Letters and Light, whose purpose is to get people to throw their literary inhibitions aside, work within a communal deadline, and have fun.

This enormous coterie of writers had produced nearly a billion words as of a couple of days ago. (In 2009, the total was nearly 2.5 billion.) At the end of the month, writers upload their work for a word count. Last year, slightly more than 19 percent of NaNoWriMo writers won, which proves just how hard it is to keep up a pace of 1,667words a day, even if they’re laughably awful.


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