NaNoWriMo: 'National Novel Writing Month' Still Going Strong After 10 Years
5 years ago, before this blog was a media business, I participated in NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. It's an annual creative writing project, in which participants try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I did it in November 2003 and documented it in ReadWriteWeb. While the resulting work of art was very average, and thankfully long ago purged from the RWW server, I had a lot of fun writing the book and discovered some new things about myself.
In this post I check back in with the NaNoWriMo website to see what's changed over the years; and how much social web technology it's now using.
According to Wikipedia the NaNoWriMo project was started by Chris Baty in July 1999, with 21 participants in the San Francisco Bay area. The website was launched in 2000 and participants at that time communicated with each other via a Yahoo! group. In 2000, 140 participants attempted NaNoWriMo and 21 wrote 50,000 words. The site continued to grow and in 2007, a record 101,767 people registered - a bit over 15,000 of those managed to complete their 50k novel by the deadline. According to the NaNoWriMo twitter account, the current tally for 2008 is
118,583 authors, with 4,343 'winners' so far.
What's more, the site has raised $272,768 - NaNoWriMo is run by Office of Letters and Light, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. It's very open on where the money goes.
As well as the much-used forums, there is NaNoWriMo activity happening in many places across the Web. You can read the NaNoWriMo blog, install a Firefox add-on to display your progress, upload a pic to the Flickr group, tweet your progress, skim the Mahalo page, listen to WrimoRadio (the official podcast), and much more. However, it's fair to say that most of the discussions are still happening in the official forums. As of today there are 19,354 threads and 307,760 posts in there. So things haven't changed too much.
From the NaNoWriMo "Write-In Event"; InfoCommons@West; November 19, 2008; pic by UF InfoCommons
Other Pic: Sashala
Let us know if any RWW readers participated in NaNoWriMo this year - perhaps you're busy frantically putting the finishing touches to your novel right now! I know how you feel :-)
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I'm actually reading RWW to take a little break from my NaNoWriMo writing right this minute! Frantically working on getting to the goal - about 4800 words to go.
The site is certainly full of ways for writers to communicate with each other. I'm a first-time participant so don't know what it was like in previous years, but I can see how engaged the participants are with the current site's tools. Good one, NaNoWriMo.
Good luck Nadia! I can tell you when I finished mine in '03 it was such a feeling of satisfaction, achievement, and yes - relief! But it was worth it :-)
What a competition! Good luck everyone. This sure makes all the whining that people do about writing their dissertations seem a little out of place!
I help run a site called Scribophile (www.scribophile.com), and we're seen many of our members participating in NaNoWriMo this year. Our writing contest this month is even geared to encourage people to get their novel started. It's definitely tough to complete, but I think social media helps focus and encourage people to write. It's a lot easier to finish when you have people to commiserate with!