NaNoWriMo shouldn't be taken seriously. As its project's official site says, it was started so people can “write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.”

“The what?” you may ask. “NaNoWriMo” is the abbreviation of “National Novel Writing Month,” a project that was started by Seattle Bay Area resident Chris Baty in July 1999. Though it now has several official “Regions” and thousands of “Wrimos” around the globe, it has retained its original name.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is for participants to write a “175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, Nov. 30,” the project's official site said. Wrimos whose works are verified by the project's automated counting bots as having the required number of words are automatically declared winners—no other factor is considered.

“[NaNoWriMo] is based on this very simple idea that the inner editor that we all have is crucial, [and] that it is a very important thing, but that it’s important [only] when you get to the editing phase,” Baty told Writer Unboxed in a 2007 interview.

“...[I]t can be destructive when you’re still in the creative phase to allow [your] editorial voice to second guess and criticize work that is comprised mainly of loose, still-forming constellations of plots and characters and ideas,” he said.

“[When I created NaNoWriMo in 1999,] I was a very naïve 26-year-old who thought that if I could just convince enough of my friends to agree to write novels with me that we could have fun and write books. None of us really had any idea what we were getting into. Almost nobody was a writer. Everybody loved books, but none of us had any idea how to go about writing one,” Baty continued. “I think that was our saving grace.”

Thus, NaNoWriMo's slogan: “No Plot? No Problem!” which is also the title of Baty's guidebook for NaNoWriMo participants.

NaNoWriMo's official Regions are populated by communities called “Regional Lounges.” These can be found around the world, and one exists in the Philippines.

The Philippine NaNoWriMo community was “formed and officially recognized in NaNoWriMo on October 15, 2005,” its official site says. It now has over 300 members, and “reached the #103 rank among the 350 regions (#2 among Asian regions) in November 2007, with 2,283,893 words written.”

Communities and community-building are important to the project, as they serve as encouragement to writers who have to engage in marathon writing sessions to try and reach what may sometimes seem like an unreachable goal—become a NaNoWriMo winner.

“I just realized that in terms of motivation, it’s one thing to get these emails from some disembodied voice in Oakland at the start of each week saying, 'Write, write, you can do this!' But it’s a completely different thing to have people who, five nights a week, you can meet at your local Starbucks and actually write with,” WriterUnboxed quoted Baty.

“In addition to helping people find each other around the world, we also have resources that can help short circuit procrastination tendencies...I think a lot of people get hung up on research...[with communities, people can] just ask and someone on the site will know it and answer. A whole world of research you can basically do without ever leaving your chair.”

“I have to add,” Baty joked, “that NaNoWriMo is like a complete stealth dating site for writing nerds. I have been to two NaNo weddings. There are NaNo children in the world. So socializing can be a great way for people to meet other people who are as crazy as they are.”

As of this writing, there are 16 days left before the NaNoWriMo ends, and NaNoWriMo Philippines has upped the ante for Pinoy Wrimos. It scheduled a “Mid-Month Write-In” on Nov. 15, from 2-5 pm at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf café in Greenbelt 3, Makati City. The next write-in is scheduled on Nov. 22.

NaNoWriMo's popularity has made its organizers able to use it as a way to generate resources for the benefit of students and young writers. Aside from getting donations from major sponsors, NaNoWriMo forms partnerships with organizations willing to donate a certain amount of money in exchange for attention or participation from Wrimos. LiveJournal (LJ), an online blog service, for example, promised to donate $1 to the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program “for every [LJ] member” declared a winner in 2008, PinoyWrimo said.

According to the NaNoWriMo site, the Young Writers Program “provides kids and teens with a month-long language arts experience that improves self-esteem, teaches perseverance, and radically alters their relationship to writing and literature...through a youth-oriented website where kids and teens can mingle with other budding authors, get advice from beloved writers, and find inspiration as they tackle [a] book-writing challenge.”

Meanwhile, NaNoWriMo continues to attract participants and donors, as well as writers who want to try something new to boost their creativity and people who just want to write, period.

“[One of the myths I'd like to dispel is] the idea that NaNo[WriMo] is basically committing a horrible travesty against the written word. I think you hear that from people who have not taken part in NaNo month...[and] people who’ve never tried to write novel before as well. I think some people have the idea that novels are written by a certain species of human, they were born to write novels,” Baty said.

“I think that [the] first year of NaNo[WriMo] taught me that novels are not written by novelists, that they’re written by everyday people who give themselves permission to write novels. Once you see and realize the truth of that, I think the world becomes a much more magical place.”

One prominent Filipino Wrimo is writer Dean Alfar, who wrote his Palanca Grand Prize for Novel award-winning book “Salamanca” for NaNoWriMo in 2004.

He told ABS-CBN in an interview, “There were times that my wife (Nikki Alfar) would get mad because we weren't talking since I had to write my 2,000 words for the night. It was important for me that I wouldn't be paralyzed by fear, that I could not do it. I didn't even worry about being plagiarized because all I wanted was to finish the work.”

“I want people to write. I want them to express themselves. On the Internet, people are being influenced by other cultures but we need to be writing about ourselves. We should write from a 'glocal' perspective and let other people know more about us,” he said.

Photo 1: “NaNoWriMo Crest” courtesy of NaNoWriMo.org.
Photo 2: “nanowrimo,” by evilnick , taken from Flickr.com. Licensed under Creative Commons license number BY-NC-ND-2.0-DEED.EN.
Photo 3: “Cliff Brooks and Chris Baty,” by elkit, taken from Flickr.com. Licensed under Creative Commons license number BY-NC-SA-2.0-DEED.EN.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."