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BY LIANA KATZ

In print | November 8, 2007

It took F. Scott Fitzgerald the better part of three years to write his 50,000 word novel, “The Great Gatsby.” National Novel Writing Month, a writing contest during the month of November, challenges ambitious amateur authors to write 50,000 words in just 30 days. Novels can be written about any subject, in any genre and can even make no sense at all. The contest’s only stipulation is that its participants, known as “Wrimos,” have 50,000 words written by Nov. 30 at 11:59 p.m. All who do so are declared “winners.”

NaNoWriMo was created by Chris Baty, a freelance journalist from San Francisco, in 1999. Gathering momentum and recognition, the contest has grown from 21 registered participants in 1999 to 79,000 in 2006. In an interview with Vision Magazine, Baty said that NaNoWriMo is intended to stress “that you can have fun writing novels even if you’re not particularly gifted at it.”

“Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft,” as NaNoWriMo’s web site declares, the month is a testament to quantity over quality.

In order to participate, hopeful Wrimos are encouraged to register with NaNoWriMo’s web site and to update their novels as they progress throughout the month. The website hosts an active and supportive forum community where Wrimos can turn to find advice about everything NaNoWriMo. There are groups for everybody, from authors struggling with writing romantic fiction to teens struggling to balance writing and high-school.

NaNoWriMo has even managed to steal time away from busy Swarthmore students. Bethanne Albert-Bruninga ’10 is attempting her fourth NaNoWriMo. She has yet to complete a novel in the past, but this year she may have a better chance. Her strategy is to team up with some friends from other universities for late-night writing binges and to fuel her frenzy with coffee. Albert-Bruninga first found out about NaNoWriMo from a high-school friend, but is unsure why she continues to participate as the writing process is “pretty suicidal.”

Yet, she recognizes that “the stress and the deadline [are] part of the fun, because you can’t worry about whether or not what you’re writing is actually any good.” Albert-Bruninga also enjoys creating and animating her novels’ characters, even though “they come to life … fitfully and incompletely.”

According to Albert-Bruninga, her novel “explores sexuality in a friendship between two women. It follows them from through their lives from when they meet in high school.”

Like Albert-Bruninga, Greg Albright ‘10 is also a NaNoWriMo veteran and is participating this year “almost out of habit.” Albright takes a mathematical approach to the month and writes approximately 1667 words per day, adding up to a total of 50,000 on Nov. 30. "I have a sheet taped to my desk lamp showing word-count per day, and I will not go to bed until I’ve made word count," Albright said. Unlike Albert-Bruninga, Albright plans on revisiting and revising his novel after NaNoWriMo is over. “Ideally, my novel will spring forth and capture both the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes on its own,” Albright said, “More realistically, I will ignore it for December and begin editing over winter break.”

Albright’s hopes for literary fame may not be so far-fetched. NaNoWriMo has produced some works that were ultimately successfully published. Sara Gruen’s best-selling novel, “Flying Changes,” began as a NaNoWriMo manuscript. Based on her rough start, Gruen was offered a five million dollar contract from Harper Publishing Company. Gruen later used NaNoWriMo to prototype her next novel, “Water For Elephants,” which became a New York Times best-seller.

Maddening, sleep-depriving, rewarding; NaNoWriMo is all of the above. 50,000 words later, Wrimos are rewarded with “the glow [that comes] from making big, messy art, and watching others make big, messy art,” says NaNoWriMo’s website. “The act of sustained creation does bizarre, wonderful things to you.”

An excerpt from Bethanne Albert-Bruninga Õ10

"The spotlight comes on and I think of her. Maybe it’s the darkness of the theater encroaching on the lit stage, like the blackness of her 3 a.m. bedroom cocooning us on the softness of her bed. It’s never pitch-black on those nights, only for the first few seconds after the switch is flipped when the staticky-burned images of the overhead light are imprinted on our retinas. Then I see the dim profile of her nose in the dark, and the soft curve of her arm where it lies across my chest. Or maybe it’s the tingling in my stomach and groin as the opening measures from the orchestra sound and I know that my entrance is soon, in 3 … 2 … 1. Like the earthquakes in my core as her lips brush my ear in darkness or her fingers cross my thigh in secret where the world can’t see.

Maybe still it is the golden shaft of electric light glancing down and igniting dust motes to a brilliant sheen of lifelike warmth suspended above the stage, the same warmth captured in the strands of her sometime-white and sometime-honey hair as it catches a ray of sunshine. I feel high, the nervousness of theater making my body quiver and the superposition of images in my mind confusing me and confusing time and place. Am I here, about to enter according to my cue, or am I there, some amorphous and indefinable there, but there with her? I feel her essence pulling at me in this moment of imagination and almost her voice is whispering in my ear, her overwhelming presence just behind my shoulder.

My hand goes up, fingers reaching, softly curled, to brush her curved cheek and feel the silky skin, but before I touch her I hear my cue and bam! No longer me but now a character in a play; a quick glance behind the curtain as I cross the stage shows that she is gone."

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