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Web site encourages aspiring writers to get those novels onto paper

By LAURA MOYER

Date published: 11/6/2006

At two minutes after midnight on Wednesday, Geoff Greene of Spotsylvania County sat down and wrote the first 2,000 words of his novel.

Wednesday evening, after working all day for a Dahlgren defense contractor, Green wrote another 3,000 words. He did it again Thursday night, and planned to repeat the process day after day till he hits 50,000 words sometime before Thanksgiving.

It's madness, of course. But it's shared madness.

Greene, 25, a 2003 graduate of Mary Washington College (not the University of Mary Washington, he points out), is among 67,000 people nationwide and in several foreign countries who have signed on for the 2006 National Novel Writers Month--NaNoWriMo--whose goal is to help people set free the works of fiction trapped in their brains.

In the Fredericksburg area, at least a dozen other writers have signed up for NaNoWriMo, and Greene is in touch with some of them, sharing the joy and agony of the creative process.

The goal is deceptively simple: produce 50,000 words of a novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30, then get word counts verified to be named a NaNoWriMo "winner." There's no promise of publication, and no guarantee that anyone else will ever even read the results. All writers get is a downloadable certificate of completion, the knowledge that they've written a novel and, of course, ownership of their completed work.

It's Greene's fourth year as a NaNoWriMo participant. The first year he ran out of ideas after about 10,000 words. The second year his laptop broke at about 14,000 words. But last year he won, hitting the 50,000-word mark in time to relax and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.

His 2005 novel, a science-fiction story built around a technological innovation, may be brilliant. It may not.

"I have to admit, I actually haven't gone back and reread the novel, such as it is," Greene said.

It started in 1999, when freelance writer Chris Baty of Oakland, Calif., and 20 friends formed a support group to write the novels they knew they had in them.

Baty picked 50,000 words as the goal based on word counts of the shortest novels on his bookshelf: J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," each "slightly over 50,000," he said in a telephone interview.

Instead of toiling in solitude, the writers toiled quietly and independently in each other's company, taking occasional 20-minute breaks for group kvetching and chocolate consumption.

To keep track of productivity, Baty posted writers' daily word counts on a Web site. The group grew the next year to 140 writers, connecting mainly via computer. The third year, Baty said, he expected about 150 writers and got 5,000, a surge fueled by the burgeoning blog culture.

It's gotten bigger each year since then; by Nov. 2 this year, 67,000 participants had signed up, and Baty said he expects to hit the 75,000 mark by the end of this month.

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Date published: 11/6/2006