The saying goes, everyone has a book inside them. Here’s your chance to get it out of imagination and down on paper because November is National Novel Writing Month.
Last year’s NaNoWriMo included 431,626 participants in 633 different regions on six continents. Of these, more than 40,000 met the goal of writing 50,000 words in a month.
Especially meaningful for me is the opportunity for thousands of young writers who participate through schools, libraries, and community programs. You never know what child might become the next Steinbeck or Angelou.
This year, my friend, Sarah, and I challenged each other to pound out 50,000 words in thirty days. I met Sarah more than fifteen years ago when she was in high school and won the Student Writing Contest sponsored by the Authors of the Flathead. She asked me to be a mentor with her writing, which has been a continuing joy to me. She’s gone on to earn a PhD in astrophysics from Harvard (not with any help from me). These days, when she asks me to edit her papers, I understand only a handful of words (the, is, and, etc.), but she still likes me to check her punctuation and grammar.
In her spare time, Sarah is drafting a speculative fiction story about eternal life, but has trouble carving out time to write while she searches for planets in the Goldilocks Zone. I’m pondering a third book in the series featuring protagonist Tawny Lindholm from Instrument of the Devil. We decided to Nano.
Point is: young writers change the future. I’m betting on my friend Sarah to be one of them.