Story Photos
 Photo by Bill Wagner Crystal Martin, left, Nathaniel Exum, right, and Exum's mother, Elizabeth Evans, gather Monday at Common Ground as they get ready to write for National Novel Writing Month. |
Local writers join thousands in 30-day novel-writing exercise
Wednesday, November 1, 2006 6:53 AM PST
By Michael Andersen
Printable version
E-mail this articleAnybody who ever called writing easy never had to spend half an hour with Crystal Martin's computer screen.
"People don't know what it's like to be there," said Martin, 33, of Longview. "And the page is like, 'oh, come on, you're a writer! Write something good!' "
This month, Martin's screen may not know what hit it.
Martin is one of the tens of thousands of writers around the world who'll spend November holed up with a laptop, notebook or typewriter --- and usually a coffee pot --- in the literary equivalent of the 400-yard-dash: National Novel Writing Month.
NaNoWriMo, as it's universally known among participants, is a 7-year-old fad built on the notion that there's no day like today to write a 175-page novel.
No day, that is, like today, tomorrow and the 28 days after that.
"That's, like, 1,667 words a day," Brittany Norvell, 18, of Longview, said confidently. "I've done that before."
Norvell is "competing" in NaNoWriMo --- anybody who finishes gets added to the NaNoWriMo Web site's "winners page" --- with her sister and housemate, Jennifer Bond, 28.
Numbers like those don't seem to worry many participants. Several said they might never attempt a novel without so many others to cheer them on.
Like most local participants interviewed before this morning's starting gun, Bond heard about the event over the Internet, from a friend in one of the online writing groups she visits regularly.
Bond, a nurse at Northwest Continuum Care Center, has never taken a formal writing class. But she's been helping organize writing workshops over the Internet since 1998 when she and Norvell lived in Castle Rock with their parents and a well-used dial-up modem.
"I was terrible," recalled Norvell, who was 9 at the time and using a phony name to protect her identity. "But I was writing."
Attitudes like that one are the goal of speed-writing exercises such as NaNoWriMo, said Joseph Green, who teaches creative writing at Lower Columbia College.
Many writers he teaches must struggle to temporarily lower their standards, he said.
"I try to make them see that having committed something to the page hasn't committed it to publication," Green said.
"I always reach back to John McPhee," said Green. " 'You have to be willing to put unacceptable sentences on the page.' "
Another advantage of mass events like NaNo, participants said, is the chance to share the task over the Internet with thousands of like-minded writers.
Each November, NaNoWriMo.org explodes with traffic as writers in various genres discuss their latest plot dilemmas. Martin's novel, a 19th-century love story between the descendents of legendary Arthurian wizards and witches, will let her choose between the romance, fantasy and historical fiction boards.
For Martin, a mother of four trying to stake out a living as a professional writer, that sort of company can be hard to find in Cowlitz County.
"Every time I say I'm a writer, people look at me very strangely," she said.
On the other hand, Norvell said, NaNo can smoke out writers in unexpected places. When Norvell, who works at A&W-KFC, mentioned her project to her manager, he told her he'd been planning a novel for a while.
He may yet join in, she said Tuesday.
Whoever she can recruit locally, Norvell said, she looks forward to spending the month with her sister and an expected 75,000 strangers.
"It's nice to have someone there to tell you 'Things are going to get better,' " Norvell said. "Or just to say, 'Stop being stupid. Just write.' "
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