NaNoWriMo

November 30 is the last day of NaNoWriMo. Why wasn’t I informed of this? As Terry said to Charley in On The Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender.” Maybe next year.

The acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month. It began in July, 1999, with 21 participants. This year over 400,000 people signed up and committed to writing a 50,000 word novel in one month. A 50,000 word novel is a really short novel. The standard length for a novel is around 80,000 words.

It’s a formidable task, but I think I could write a novel in one month. There’s just one catch: no one, but no one, would read past the end of chapter one — if, indeed, they made it that far.

Writing a novel in a month is one thing. Writing a good novel in a month,  however, requires talent, imagination, and perseverance. Lately, I’ve been running low on all three. Writing a Reader’s Digest article in 30 days feels much more in my wheelhouse. I could title it, “How to write a novel in 30 days.”

I’m joking, of course. But there was someone who could have written such an article, and his name was Isaac Asimov. He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. That is the equivalent of writing a full-length book every two weeks for 25 years. He wrote novels and he wrote science books on a wide variety of topics. If you look up the dictionary definition of the word prolific, there’s a picture of Isaac Asimov.

Without question, Asimov would have been the NaNoWriMo champ.