UA students and professors join writers across the country this month to participate in National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo,” with the hopes of completing a 50,000-word first draft before December.
Shea Stripling, president of Sigma Tau Delta English honor society and a senior majoring in English and creative writing is also a “wrimo,” – what the organization calls participants – and said the result is worth the work.
“It’s a bit difficult trying to set aside that time to write every day, but it feels satisfying once you actually do it,” Stripling said.
She has never made a serious NaNoWriMo attempt and is using the month to complete her project about a celebrity.
“I’ve been working on a Bill Murray project for a while, and I thought it might give me the motivation to actually finish it,” Stripling said. “I’ve been writing a few prose poems about his movies for about six months or so, but this is the first time I’ve written about him in just straight prose.”
Stripling joins a growing annual number of “wrimos” in a literary sprint to December. The event has grown from 21 participants in its first year in 1999 to over 256,000 registered participants last year.
Amanda Nichols is the municipal liaison for NaNoWriMo in Tuscaloosa. She said Shea, as a student “wrimo,” is not alone.
“Because this is a college town activity varies year to year,” she said. “The last couple of years we’ve had a small portion of students, but student participation seems to be a lot more active this year.”
As a municipal liaison, Nichols organizes events where local “wrimos” can meet and share ideas.
“Municipal liaisons are local volunteers who help organize NaNoWriMo groups in their hometowns,” she said. “Being an ML can be serious work, but it’s also a lot of fun.”
Some of the events put on by Nichols include a Kickoff Party, a TGIO – Thank God It’s Over – party, and the infamous write-ins, where “wrimos” gather at a single location to hunker down and up their word counts.
Nichols said write-ins will be held every Sunday at the Tuscaloosa public library.
“At the write-ins I bring a miniature cemetery where we can honor the characters that were put to rest for the sake of literary abandon,” she said. “Evil Plot Bunny also makes an appearance. His suggestions will either give your story a much needed kick in the pants or throw a wrench in it. He is evil, so you never know what kind of crazy situations or characters he’ll give you.”
Among this year’s “wrimo” ranks are also UA professors. Patti White, a professor in the English department, is participating in her third NaNoWriMo.
“The first time I did it, I ended up with a 50,000-word draft of a novel, which is still under revision — in fact, the revision of that draft is what I am doing for this year’s NaNoWriMo,” said White. “I recognize that the majority of what I wrote before will need to be trashed — as is the case with most first drafts, I think.”
Some of White’s drafts, however, wind up elsewhere.
“The second time, instead of writing another novel draft, I used November to write a book-length poetry manuscript,” said White. “The completed version of that manuscript, now titled Chain Link Fence, will be published this spring by Anhinga Press.”
White said NaNoWriMo pushes the writer to continue writing without revision, which maintains momentum in the process.
“You keep up a forward momentum no matter how clunky your prose or peculiar the plot,” she said. “In my novel draft, whenever I got stuck I just killed someone off — one of the main characters or a minor figure, whoever — and that would propel me forward. The odd thing is, by the end of the month, all those deaths made sense in the context of the plot. The forward momentum carried me to a story I never intended.”
