ANEW: NaNoWriMo, and Other New Beginnings
Or, Don't just stand there...
So much of American Culture and the belief about the nation in general references beginnings. Although we have had yet another dose of bleakness this election season, the news is not all bad. Like our very lives, America has always been about the beginning of things, the start of things. It’s in our very DNA. Even after some of the major misty dawns of American society, and there have been plenty, we still try to focus on new beginnings, new starts.
One such place of beginning for many writers around the world is an event called NaNoWriMo. For those of you who haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month.
Over the years, probably since 2008, I have attempted NaNoWriMo about 8 or 9 times. Fortunately, I have won twice, meaning I completed two novels and have another 6 or 7 starts in various forms of completion sitting in one of the many drives on various computers or clouds over the years.
NaNoWriMo started in this little bitty shop in Berkeley, California. Between 2016 - and 2019, before COVID-19, my family and I rented a tiny one-bedroom house around the corner from where Chris Baty began NaNoWriMo. The block had more than a few churches, many thriving homes, a couple of abandoned houses on the rebound, and a very robust homeless encampment on the other side of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. This whole scene sat on the border of Berkeley and Oakland, Califonia. The neighborhood that birthed one of the significant writing movements of the last quarter century started from humble beginnings:
Chris Baty started NaNoWriMo in July 1999 as a fun experiment among a small group of friends. Baty, a freelance writer and editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area, wanted to write a novel but found it hard to start. So, he proposed the idea of writing a novel in one month, hoping that a tight deadline would push them all to get words down without overthinking or succumbing to writer’s block.
The first NaNoWriMo involved just 21 participants. Their goal was straightforward: write 50,000 words in 30 days, a target inspired by the short length of novels like The Great Gatsby. The idea was to write quickly, silence the inner critic, and experience the thrill of finishing a first draft. That initial event was chaotic and challenging, but it was also exhilarating. At the end of the month, they found that even if the novels were messy and unfinished, the sense of accomplishment was incredible.
Word spread, and by the following year, the event was moved to November to align with the colder, quieter season (ideal for writing). Participation grew rapidly, and in 2005, NaNoWriMo officially became a nonprofit organization. Chris Baty continued to lead NaNoWriMo for several years, overseeing its expansion into a global movement that now supports hundreds of thousands of writers annually, with resources, forums, pep talks, and in-person events.
Baty’s simple but powerful idea—that anyone can write a novel with a set goal, community support, and a bit of urgency—has since become the foundation of NaNoWriMo’s enduring success. (ChatGPT)
So why am I telling you all about this? First, it’s to do a little “meta” experiment while using Artificial Intelligence in the background, giving it credit on that research end of things (see above). Second, and here’s the exciting news (or burying the lede as they used to say in the newspaper business), it’s to announce to you that for the next successive Fridays, I will serialize one of those novels to get it out into the world to drum up readership for ANEW.
The working title for the piece is B.C.Y., which stands for BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS. This is a title I cannot use, or will not use, because one of my classmates already has written and published a novel by that same name last year. So B.C.Y. it is, at least until you, dear reader, can suggest a new title, perhaps in the reading or by the end. And maybe this will be the only place people will ever know what B.C.Y. actually means. So, take a look starting this Friday for the fast first take.
Curated Reading:
What kind of classmate would I be if I didn’t reference Andrew Pessin’s book, Bright College Years, which you can learn more about HERE? Although I haven’t read Andy’s yet, my book is probably more of a bildungsroman. My favorite of that genre is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: ANovel. Ellison also had to contend with H.G. Wells’s book of the near same name, The Invisible Man, which I also have not read — Wells not Ellison. Take a look at this California Newsreel presentation of excerpts from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, played by none other than Jacques Smith, a fellow Thornton Township High School alumni from Harvey, IL, which also features the late great John Amos and is narrated by the equally illustrious and dearly departed Andre Braugher. Three fine careers, all in one video.