by Jen Reeder

In the words of Ernest Hemingway: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Throughout the month of November, more than 250,000 people around the world will be doing just that in honor of National Novel Writing Month, aka “NaNoWriMo,” including 311 participants from the Durango area. Their goal is to write an original novel of 50,000 words (about 175 pages) by the end of the month.

“The thing I love about NaNo is you are forced to set aside time to write,” said Melissa McConnell, 26, a municipal liaison for NaNoWriMo’s Durango contingent. “There’s no ‘I’ll put it off until the end’ – you have to be writing every day in order to make that 50,000 word goal.”

According to the NaNoWriMo website, it was founded by freelance writer Chris Baty “and 20 other overcaffeinated yahoos” in 1999. The idea of ignoring one’s “inner editor” and just cranking out a novel caught on, and National Novel Writing Month is now run by the nonprofit Office of Letters and Light in Oakland, Calif., to help handle the growth. There were 256,618 participants in 2011, with 36,843 “winners,” or people able to hit the 50,000 word count by midnight Nov. 30. (Writing one word 50,000 times is against the rules, incidentally.) Some books born during NaNoWriMo – and subsequently revised and edited – have been published, including three New York Times best sellers: Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen; The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern; and Cinder, by Marissa Meyer.

McConnell, a Fort Lewis College grad who works six days a week as a furniture saleswoman, has participated in NaNoWriMo three times. She got involved after reading Baty’s book No Plot, No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. She said she likes writing with NaNoWriMo because normally she can get wrapped up in worrying about writing aspects like plot or grammar, which can be inhibiting.

“But with NaNo, you don’t have a chance to worry about that – you just throw all of that out the window and go,” McConnell said. “You just go for it.”
As municipal liaison, her main job is to organize events to support other local participants, such as “write ins” every Wednesday from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at Durango Coffee Co. There, participants gather to boost their word counts with games like “word sprints” – someone sets a timer for 15 minutes and they write as fast as they can. At the kickoff party at the library, attendees wrote down something that represents their inner editor and locked them in a box.

“The whole idea is throughout the month you don’t have to worry if it’s good or it’s bad or if it’s correct,” McConnell said. “For me, NaNo is the  chance to get it out there and produce a rough draft. I try to work on it throughout the next year.”

She said her boyfriend knows when November rolls around that she’ll be focused on writing.

In a mad rush to reach National Novel Writing Month’s Dec. 1 deadline, a group of local writers type away in the basement of Durango Coffee Co. The group gathers once a week to write and offer moral support./Photo by Steve Eginoire

“He’s been really supportive: ‘Oh, you’re writing now – I’ll leave you alone and see you in December,’” she laughed.

She’s still working on revising her NaNo novels but has self-published an anthology of science fiction stories on Kindle called “Breaking Barriers.” This year for NaNoWriMo, she’s working on a fairy tale. She often participates online in NaNo’s forum for local writers.

“We call ourselves ‘Plot Doctors.’ So if someone’s having trouble with, ‘I need my characters to get from A to B. What do I do?’ we all throw out ideas,” McConnell said. “It’s really fun. The community of writers is a really interesting, intelligent, unique group of people that wouldn’t normally be thrown together … I’ve made some lifetime friends I never would have met any other way.”

Susie Henderson, 53, is Durango’s other municipal liaison. This is her fourth year participating in NaNoWriMo, and she’s “won” her past three years – even though she has been battling breast cancer. In fact, the day before NaNo started this year, she got the news she was out of remission. But that didn’t sway her interest in participating in National Novel Writing Month again this year – if anything, it heightened it as an act of defiance.

“I don’t care if I’m sick, I’m going to write 50,000 words in 30 days,” Henderson said. “Writing is one of my stress reliefs – it’s my sanity.”

She writes beyond the suggested 1,667 words a day – often writing 5,000 – in case she is unable to write other days due to exhaustion or a cloudy head from treatments. She said NaNo revealed a hidden talent for writing quickly; her personal record for a 15-minute word sprint is 835 words. This year, she’s eschewing an outline and “going plotless.”

“My topic this year is a young man who writes historical fiction and falls into history through his book. It’s called So Into My Book, Henderson said.

Henderson is editing six of her novels and is preparing to self-publish a nonfiction book How to Build Your Own House Without Murdering Anyone.

Henderson enjoys the NaNoWriMo community, which she shares with her daughter Jessi, 19, who is also participating in NaNo for the fourth time.

“I love it. It’s kind of fun to have an excuse to be excessively creative,” Jessi Henderson said.

She said having such a bold deadline helps with her procrastination issues.

“I kind of know when it’s getting toward the end of the day, ‘OK, I have to set aside this much time,’ which means stop playing on the Internet or reading or whatever I’m doing – I have to do this now,” she said. “Writing is not something you can just do – it takes a lot of practice.”

The light at the end of the tunnel for Durango’s National Novel Writing Month participants extends beyond Nov. 30 to a “Thank God It’s Over” party hosted by Maria’s Bookshop on Dec. 3. Libby Cowles, community relations manager at Maria’s, said the bookstore is happy to be a part of the NaNoWriMo celebration.

“We’ve hosted the party in the past, and it’s really fun,” Cowles said. “I love seeing the way the writers in our community support each other for the project. I think that’s probably the coolest thing about it.”

But that doesn’t mean she’s ready to pick up a pen and join the NaNoWriMo throngs next year.
“I’m a reader, not a writer,” she said with a laugh.

For more information about National Novel Writing Month, visit www.nanowrimo.org.