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Buckle Up for This Year's NaNoWriMo!

By VJ
NaNoWriMo Contest: National Novel Writing MonthHave you ever started a novel and gone short of accomplishing the task, cowed away by the sheer pressure and apprehension on the quality of your work? If so, NaNoWriMo is for you. This is the short for National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a one-month long novel-writing program starting on November 1 and ending on the 30th. So, be sure to register free for the program before Oct 31.

Within those thirty days, you need to finish a novel up to 175 pages (50,000 words). The specialty of this program is that the quality of the work doesn’t matter; only the quantity does. You can submit any crappy novel of 50,000 words, if you want to win the game. It’s a program that exists there only to remove fear and apprehension from the minds of writers.

Since 1999 NaNoWriMo is here, allowing people to participate. Now, almost 300,000 participants have won the contest.

NaNoWriMo is only a jovial contest, without any prize. The only prize you get is an online certificate of your successful completion of a novel, but the real prize lies in your success over your fear of writing. Nobody is gonna check if you are actually writing a novel or copy-pasting hundred Wikipedia stories. The real fun lies in actually completing that difficult novel you have been thinking for over a year within a single month.

There are, however, rare instances when people got published through this program. Jon F Merz’s The Destructor, Lani Diane Rich’s Time Off for Good Behavior, etc., are examples of them.

If you have been cowed by the deadlines of finishing a novel, then that’s why you should write on NaNoWriMo. It’s just a month to spare, every year, and you can show the world if you can keep the deadlines or not. So far, the results show that only 15 per cent of the people participating in the program have been able to cross the word count threshold. So, the competition is much reduced. Out of these 15 %, how many writers write great novels, we don’t know.

Anyways, go ahead, readers, give it a try. If you don’t want to write, still you can be part of this great program by volunteering to be a municipal liaison. Read this to know more about this.

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008
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