The Success Stories From Nanowrimo

Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it is a great thing. It was started in 1999 by Chris Baty in the San Francisco Bay Area. The idea is that you write a 50,000 word novel and it gets verified on the site and you are a winner — the prize? The fact that you wrote a novel.

It may seem gimmicky from the outside, and it is, to a degree. The thing is the gimmick is a spur to get people from vaguely wishing they had written a novel to writing one, and over a span of 30 days. When you hit that finish line, after hitting the daily finish lines you really do feel a sense of achievement, and if the novel is not perhaps the greatest novel ever written, you at least have a hunk of raw material to work with.

There is a community built around it, and it’s no small thing. Most large towns and some of the smaller ones have groups of writers who meet up for significant milestones in the month, and can be seen in coffee shops and restaurants with their laptops, hammering away at the keyboard writing the next potential best seller.

The competition keeps growing, and with some really big successes coming out of the process, that’s only going to garner more attention for it.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen.

Wool, by Hugh Howey.

And there are others. Like a lot of great ideas it is something that has a really simple premise, and the framework that it provides for people is really effective in helping them to push through the normal barriers to achieve their goals. Having a whole bunch of people pulling in the same direction doesn’t hurt.

Some of the best inventions and innovations in technology have at their base this idea — that they are designed to help someone. All of the fancy window dressing and the bells and whistles really don’t mean anything if you aren’t actually doing something to help people.

When you hit upon an idea that does that, depending on how many people have a need for that problem to be solved, you are barely going to even have to sell the thing. Why? It sells itself — it creates its own promotion … people can see that it is helping others, and they will often tell people about the successful action that they engaged in, because again … they want to help others.

A self help book helps, but so does a potboiler, or literature of any kind — even if you don’t elucidate much upon the human condition, you are providing entertainment, and some escapism for your readers (and most would consider that to be helpful). Nanowrimo helps. Before we even look at the fact that they raise money and provide help to different organizations, just the fact of inspiring someone to sit down and harness their purpose to the action of writing a novel is helping.

I do it, not even to complete a novel necessarily. You can network with other writers. You start a novel at least. I have written many books that started because of the work I did during Nano. As I keep saying — it is a great thing. Go check it out.