This week marks the beginning of an exciting 30 days, the ninth annual National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as participants like to say, sounding all literate and able to pronounce strange words.
The goal of NaNoWriMo is to produce a 175-page novel by midnight, Nov. 30. That's 50,000 words. To put that in perspective, this column is about 450 words, except on the days when I have not had enough coffee, and it falls to around 350.
Anyway, to make the NaNoWriMo deadline would be like me writing about 112 columns during the month. And given that I am a procrastinator and would undoubtedly wait until Nov. 14 to even think about NaNoWriMo, that'd be, um ... like 10 a day. Or something. Obviously, my novel would not be about math.
But yours could be! And there's no pressure whatsoever! The thing that makes NaNoWriMo special is that it encourages crappy writing. As the official Web site explains, "because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly."
It's an opportunity for millions of aspiring writers to pull a novel straight out of their asses, unedited and with word count as the only requirement. Think of the possibilities!
This morning, I was going over in my head ideas for my own little 50,000-word novella, things I might start on in two weeks or so when the panic over the Nov. 30 deadline strikes. I want to combine all sorts of fun stuff in one big, nonsensical treatise that I can show my grandchildren as proof that I have no talent whatsoever. I'm thinking unicorns and Oprah Winfrey and a long journey and maybe an acid trip or something (I have to have some plot device explaining how they all end up together, after all).
I don't really know yet what Oprah is doing, riding that unicorn sidesaddle across the Texas countryside. Maybe she's on her way to visit Dr. Phil and the two of them are going to write a novel for NaNoWriMo. Ooh, that'd be weird.
I just hope I can get it all done by deadline so I can print up copies to include with Christmas cards. Let me know if you'd like one. It'll come with a couple of Tylenol in the book jacket to lessen your pain.
E-mail your unicorn/acid trip stories to Leah at lshafer@quickdfw.com.
