My name is Amanda Straw, and I am a five-time NaNoWriMo winner and first-time ML for the Harrisburg region. NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, a global writing challenge in which participants (known as Wrimos) attempt to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. In 2016, NaNoWriMo boasted 384,126 participants in 646 regions, and over 34,000 made it to the finish line (including yours truly).
Municipal Liaisons (MLs) are local volunteers who make NaNoWriMo a fun and engaging social event—they schedule and host group writing sessions, known as write-ins, at local venues; oversee the regional forum on NaNoWriMo.org; and act as official NaNo representatives by passing on messages from NaNo HQ, giving pep talks and advice to local Wrimos, and helping raise funds for the nonprofit Office of Letters and Light that runs the whole shebang.
NaNoWriMo is my favorite time of year. For me, it’s better than Christmas! I love to write, and when I heard about NaNo during my junior year of college, I signed up instantly. I didn’t win that year—I had to wait until I finished college to earn my first winner’s certificate—but I loved every minute of it, and I’ve participated every year since.
My favorite part of NaNo is the sense of community. NaNo connects me with so many people who love writing just as much as I do, and I’ve gotten so much support and great advice from both the online forums and the local community that I would never consider doing NaNo “on my own.” Sure, getting to 50,000 words is tough, but when you’ve got a whole group of fellow writers giving you pep talks, helping you banish your Inner Editor, encouraging you to go on even when you just want to burn everything you’ve written, and cheering for you when you do finally stumble across that finish line at 11:30 pm on the 29th of November, it definitely makes the struggle much easier to bear.
So if you want to try NaNo, but you’re not sure you could write a whole 50,000 words in a month, take heart: it breaks down to 1,667 words a day, which doesn’t seem nearly as impossible, does it? A good way to work up to meeting a daily quota is by employing the Pomodoro technique. This is a time management technique that breaks a task down into intervals of 15-30 minutes followed by a short break, usually 5-10 minutes. The classic pomodoro interval is 25 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break, repeated for the duration of the task. Short breaks improve focus and help keep the dreaded “burnout” at bay.
More skilled writers can combine the pomodoro technique with the word sprint. A word sprint is a timed interval in which the writer writes as fast as possible without stopping until the timer goes off. The NaNoWriMo website and the @NaNoWordSprints Twitter account offer group word sprints in which Wrimos can compete against one another to see who can write the most words in a given time period, usually 15-45 minutes. By employing both techniques together, I was able to write 10,000 words in a single day during NaNo 2015. I’m not saying they were all good words, mind you, but NaNoWriMo prizes quantity over quality.
If you’d like to learn more about NaNoWriMo, you can use Hoopla, one of the e-resource providers offered by DCLS, to borrow No Plot? No Problem!, the NaNo introduction/advice guide written by NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty. Also available on Hoopla are Fast Fiction by Denise Jaden, another advice guide to writing a 50,000-word draft in a month, and Pep Talks for Writers, a new advice guide from NaNoWriMo executive director Grant Faulkner. You can also join the Harrisburg Wrimos for a write-in at East Shore Area Library on Sunday, November 26, from 1-4 pm in Room B.
For a complete listing of area write-ins and events, please visit our Region Homepage at http://nanowrimo.org/regions/usa-pennsylvania-harrisburg or find us on Twitter @HbgPANano or Facebook at Harrisburg Area NaNo Group. You can also email me at hbgpanano@gmail.com. Join us, and you can become a noveling superhero today!