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A KICK IN THE KEYBOARD Aspiring novelists face challenge: 50,000 words this month
Web site encourages aspiring writers to get those novels onto paperDate 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.
Read more stories about Fredericksburg Date published: 11/6/2006
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