This article originally appeared in the Features section of the November 10, 2009 issue of “The Stanford Daily”
Student initiated class designed to help participants complete novels for National Novel Writing Month
By Caity Monroe
It’s a Friday night at Nexus Café in the Stanford Medical Center. The cafeteria-style tables are fairly empty; clanking dishes and faintly playing oldies provide a backdrop for the tapping keys of 10 laptops in the process of producing 10 different novels in the next 24 days.
“Ten thousand, thirty five words,” one typist announces with a tone of pride and simultaneous relief.
A supportive round of applause and a few congratulatory remarks answer her as she intently continues typing. She has 39,965 to go.
This November marks the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a now-international effort that has been met with enthusiasm and dedication here on campus. NaNoWriMo started in 1999 in the Bay Area with 21 writers and has grown each year, with more than 120,000 participants in 2008. The goal is to write an entire novel (50,000 words or roughly 175 pages) before midnight on Nov. 30.
Hari Rai Khalsa ‘11, an anthropology major, has been participating in NaNoWriMo for the past five years. At six days into her novel, she was optimistic and excited about the next 24 days.
“The two times I’ve done contemporary novels, they’ve turned out to be a disaster, which is why I have high hopes for this one,” Khalsa said.
She has the fall of her senior year in high school–when the heat in her house wasn’t working–to thank for a career as a NaNoWriMo writer. Her family had a large pile of newspapers by their fire, and the newspaper lying on top happened to have a big headline about National Novel Writing Month.
“I thought, ‘Whoa, this sounds awesome,’ opened up the article [which] had the Web site and got so excited instantly,” she recalled.
Even though it was already Nov. 15, she started writing that very night. She’s been participating every year since.
After having spent her first November here at Stanford holed away in her dorm experiencing what she described as a “sad and secluded novel writing experience,” Khalsa decided to start the student-initiated class here at Stanford for NaNoWriMo. Now in its second year, the class spends September and October doing writing exercises and preparing for a month of frenzied word production.
Atticus Lee ’10 is one of the twelve ambitious students in the class.
“It’s sort of like this thing I’ve wanted to do it since I was really young,” Lee explained. “But I’ve never had the time…and I always procrastinated.”
This ambitious strategy of attacking an entire novel in one month removes the daunting threat of having a book hanging over your head for years. Lee, who as of Nov. 5 was 5,000 words into her novel, explained that the process is a personal challenge.
“This kind of forces you to confront your demons,” she said.
NaNoWriMo’s Web site (www.nanowrimo.org) explains that this “seat of your pants” approach to novel writing helps aspiring novelists to “put away all those self-defeating worries and START.”
Khalsa admits that outside of November it’s hard to fit novel writing into a busy schedule–NaNoWriMo provides the necessary incentive to find time for it.
“Amongst all the other school work it’s hard for me to justify taking the time out of my day to write if it’s not ‘for’ something,” she said.
Given the average Stanford student’s busy daily schedule, this is hardly surprising.
Emily Rials ’11, an English major with a creative writing emphasis who has written for The Daily, is co-leading the class with Khalsa. She was first told about NaNoWriMo as a senior in high school in her creative writing club and has been participating every year since that time.
“I liked the idea of writing something long and having it be legitimized,” she explained, adding, “It was amazing.”
Yet while compressing this process into one single month frees up a year or two in the long run, it makes for a hectic 30 days. Moshe Zadka, a Palo Alto software engineer who came to the write-in at Nexus café, explained how he finds the time to participate in the event.
“Basically in November I cut down on my social engagements and a little bit on sleep,” Zadka said.
Khalsa came up with a more innovative technique her freshman year. In an attempt to maximize writing time without sacrificing schoolwork, she introduced a crazy philosopher into her novel. Her philosophy IHUM notes doubled as the dialogue for this new character.
This is the ultimate embodiment of the quantity-over-quality mentality.
Students will revise their novels in December, but for now these novels progress uninhibited by any sort of editing process. Zadka acknowledged the hardest part of NaNoWriMo: “to keep writing even when you’re sure your novel sucks,” he said.
Lee agreed, but added that, for now, the word count is all that matters.
“It’s okay to be mediocre in this class–unlike all the rest of Stanford,” she joked.
Khalsa admitted to coming up with fairly obscure plotlines to keep the novel moving and to boost word count, such as mafia men trying to make the perfect soufflé and hit men walking in the door.
“I always think about this quote that says, ‘if your characters aren’t doing anything, have someone walk in the door with a gun and something will happen,’” she said.
Though she usually doesn’t take this tip on progressing a stagnated plot quite so literally, one year she did.
“I decided, ‘I’m going to have this guy be a hit man and try and kill her. That will be more interesting,’” she added.
One hundred and seventy-five pages filled with typos, wrong verb tenses and desperately obscure plot developments seem to be a pervasive theme among these developing novels. Given that those 50,000 words spread out over 30 days comes to a daily average of 1,667 words, this haphazard approach seems entirely understandable and reasonable.
Most importantly though, while the time pressure elicits many mistakes, it also allows for unrestrained creativity. Khalsa explains that while the hit man was definitely a “disaster,” she doesn’t think–with due editing and elaboration–that “it was an unsalvageable one. I can tell you I would never come up with anything of that sort if I had had the time to reconsider that decision,” Khalsa said.
“Oftentimes that’s when the best parts come out–the parts you never saw coming,” she added.