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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.
As participation took off, NaNoWriMo got nonprofit status and solicited contributions to cover operating expenses and to help others as well. Half of all donations and proceeds from merchandise sales are used to support libraries in poor areas of Southeast Asia--Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam so far.
NaNoWriMo also has a separate young-writers program, with 11,000 participants ages 12 and younger.
It's been life-changing for Baty, who is 33. He still does freelance writing, but running NaNoWriMo has become a career, one he plans to expand with a screenplay-writing month in June.
And his first NaNoWriMo novel, the one he wrote with those 20 friends in 1999, is being shopped around to major publishers this week by an agent who discovered Baty through the project.
If it sells, he'll join fewer than a dozen other NaNoWriMo participants who have published novels written, or at least begun, in the program.
But Baty insists that the goal of National Novel Writing Month is not publication--it's just getting that book written.
A big part of NaNoWriMo's appeal is the deadline. Far from being oppressive, a deadline is a liberator, Baty says, because it gets the writer over the mental hurdle of high expectations.
It's not about writing well. It's about finishing.
Naturally, the idea has critics. They suggest that unwritten novels are unwritten for a good reason, and they question whether the world really needs another several thousand bad novels floating around.
"I feel like yes, that is exactly what the world needs," Baty said. "We've become passive consumers of culture," absorbing other people's television shows, movies, music, books and Internet entertainment.
NaNoWriMo turns consumers into producers, he said.
"An era where everybody is writing novels is an era where everybody is more engaged, and having fun," Baty said. "Writing novels is just monkey barrels of fun."
That may be so, but it can also be agonizing, as some Fredericksburg-area participants have discovered.
Hannah Billings of Spotsylvania, a 16-year-old Massaponax High School sophomore, started outlining her NaNoWriMo novel last spring. But when the Nov. 1 start time arrived, she found herself irresistibly drawn to a new video game, "Final Fantasy 12."
She eventually did start writing her novel, a fantasy, and plans to plug away at it in between her eight-class high school schedule, chores, socializing and reading other books for fun.
P. June Diehl, 52, has gotten a faster start, hitting 8,376 words of "Logan's Lament-Part II" by Friday, three days into the project. It helps that she's got the characters and plot pinned down, and that this year's effort is an extension of last year's novel, which she completed by the Nov. 30 deadline.
Diehl commutes each day by bus to her IT job in Washington, and she does a lot of pre-writing mentally on those trips, she said. She writes during her lunch hour, then comes home and writes more each evening in the company of her five cats.
The process is so intense, and she's so absorbed in it, she said, that "I seem to be dreaming my novel in my sleep."
It helps, Diehl said, that she sees her NaNoWriMo output as a draft, rather than a final product.
She knows she can go back later and delete, rearrange and think critically.
Right now, though, it's about putting one word in front of the other.
Such a mind-set could lead to some really bad prose.
But Diehl said she had a pleasant realization last month as she prepared for 2006 NaNoWriMo.
She reread last year's novel, all 62,000 words of it, "and some of it surprised me," she said. "I thought: 'Hey! This isn't too bad.'"
ON THE NET: nanowrimo.org
To reach LAURA MOYER:
Email: lmoyer@freelancestar.com
