Every November, hundreds of thousands of crazy people from around the world gather in coffeeshops, in restaurants and in their own homes to speed-write novels.

The goal: 50,000 words of fiction by the 30th of November. The prize: eternal bragging rights, several pounds of baked goods-related weight gain, and marked deterioration in work performance and personal relationships.

So why would they do it??? It's fun, challenging, ludicrous, hilarious and inspiring, and this will be my fourth year participating. Please join me! There will be organized "write-in" events around Switzerland. Visit www.nanowrimo.org for more information.

Sounds like fun, hundreds of thousands of Joanne Rowling wannabies hoping to pen the next Harry Potter..

what lofty literary ambitions

The product of the speed-novel is often not pretty, but that's not the point. It's about the challenge and the comradeship and the creativity that ordinary people are capable of. Because I'm writing a book I'm a "wannabe"?

Happily, the amount of fun, the quality of the writing, and the novelty of the content are not correlated. Besides, I wouldn't mind a couple hundred-thousand more tales like Harry Potter in circulation.

Yesterday, a fellow would-be writer told me that she would be doing this challenge this year. I wouldn't normally consider participating in this kind of silliness (I prefer to organise my own foolishness), but work on my book has stalled and I thought it would be quite motivational to break my non-routine, write something at the same time as lots of other people, and stick to a strict deadline.

I started wondering about the quality of the short story I could write in a month. She saw that I had missed the point and explained:

Writer Girl: "You have to write 50,000 words."
Me (eyes bulging, cartoon-like): "What? That's mental."
Mental Writer Girl: "I plan to write 2,000 a day, allowing for some days where I won't be able to do anything."
Me: "Hmm... I can do 2,000 a day, but only if I have really good ideas and it's all planned."
MWG: "No, no. You're still not getting it. The idea is quantity, not quality."
For some reason, English Forum came to mind.
Me: "But I'm a perfectionis."
MWG: "You have to write 50,000 words. You don't endlessly edit sentences. You blast through the inner critic, the inner editor, who slows you down and ultimately stops you from writing. You overwhelm him with such a volume of words that he dies forever."
I felt a faint stirring of motivation.
Inspirational Mental Writer Girl: "Real writers write every day, even when they don't feel like it. They don't say, 'It's too cold today, too hot, too June.' They write."
Me: "I should write Robots versus Vampires."
She failed to laugh. Her seriousness made me take my idea seriously, and it felt right.
Me: "And I should tell everyone that I'm going to write Robots versus Vampires, because if I tell everyone, I might actually do it."
IMWG: "I can't wait to read it."
Me: "And as further incentive to get it done, as a punishment for failure, I'll promise to organise another of those awful-for-me, great-fun-for-everyone-else events I'm so good at."
IMWG mumbled something about 'not wearing contact lenses' but I was too busy thinking about which real-life people to turn into story characters, and which to kill off first.

SUMMARY:
I will be writing a 50,000 word story called Robots versus Vampires in November.
If I fail to finish, I will organise a fun EF event as punishment.

This sounds like a really good idea. I'm going to toy with the idea and see if I really want to follow through with it. Maybe draw up a few sketches and see where it leads. I've never done anything like this before, but I've been trying to think up ways to deal with some all-or-nothing sides of my personality. This may be just the ticket.

Wow. I think I am totally probably maybe in!
However, as I will be traveling through most of the month of November, this will have to take the form of a travelogue adventure tale, possibly involving Amazons. And deep dish pizza.

How many words?

Haven't read the books or seen the films. Any good

I did this last year. I needed a kick start for some other writing, and so I went 3 weeks and wrote about 32k words of ..... drivel. I may actually do it again this year.

I think it's a great way to get yourself to write, and if you have problems with perfectionism - obsessive editing - this is a great way to work through that. No one has to see it, you can write total crap, it's just that doing it can be really helpful.

I'm thinking of joining in this year, mainly thanks to lots of enthusiasm from the Typewriter Brigade (http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3699457), which I am practically compelled to join, given my obsession

I am looking forward to giving my typewriters some exercise! It should be fun... (and just a little noisy). I'll probably use some OCR software to get it into the computer afterward for editing.

Nice to meet a few fellow aspiring novelists on here! This is going to be insane.

Wow! Fellow WriMos! On EF! So excited! Can't wait for the write-ins!

To escape from the exclamation marks... I did NaNoWriMo twice when I was teaching in England, and both times I failed miserably, once due to a lack of preparation, the second time due to that dreadful bunch of people known as Ofsted calling my school on the 2nd November...

I moved here and tried again last year. Despite being ill for half of November I managed to churn out 51,000 odd words... but I didn't finish the novel. I then got even worse, and spent several months in hospital. When I came back, I turned back to the writing and finished the story in around 95,000 words. I'm now in the process of sending it out to agents.

This year I'm writing a sequel. Got my plot outline all worked out, just working on the timeline to fine-tune it. I'm also using some resources from the Young Writers Programme to develop my characters.

Anyone want to be writing buddies? My NaNo name is Vlh22...

See you at the write-ins!

Wow- this is really cool. This may be the sort of thing that will actually inspire me to try writing. I've often thought about it, but have been too afraid to try. Thanks for posting!

I've bought my Royal Safari typewriter and may give it a whirl this year...

I feel the same, I haven't ever actually wrote anything to date.
Although, I have a very vivvid imagination and I have been involved in the creative side of life since I was very young.
I am an actor by trade but I am very interested in getting involved and meeting people with the same ambitions...
Any pointers for what I might have to do? What are these write-ins? Do you have to be experienced, because that is something I lack.
It sounds soo much fun though and would be willing to have some in-put.
Mail me or just reply on here, either way I look forward to hearing from someone and getting the creative juices flowing again

If you're asking about NaNoWrMo - then you sign up at the website - there is a group in Switzerland, and people do get together. But you don't have to - you can also just do it on your own, whatever you prefer.

If you've already got a plot then you start from that on Nov 1. If not, then you just write and see where it takes you.

There are also people who do a non-traditional NaNoWrMo- finishing an old novel, or something that's not quite fiction. THe thing I like about it is that you can adapt it to whatever you want, and get as much support as you like, or not.

Since you never have to show it to anyone, you can write complete and utter trash.... but the act of writing is a good thing... and can make you more creative.

So er, can you get laid going to these events? I imagine it's full of single women in turtleneck sweaters and horn rimmed glasses sitting with a glass of wine and a laptop, getting all dreamy.

Hmm.

Martha put down her glass. There's only so much wine you can drink in one life but it'll never be enough, she thought. Time to quit the fags, too, and ...[continues for another 50,000 wordzzz...]

Martha played nervously with the frames of her horn-rimmed glasses, feeling a nervous sweat beginning to trickle down her back beneath the scratchy fabric of her black wool turtleneck. Why hadn't she opted for the much cooler pale blue silk? She glanced once again at the glossy screen of her laptop, surreptitiously watching the watcher reflected from across the quiet cafe. It was him. He was back again. There wasn't much she could do; she could hardly cause a scene, it was public place after all, and she still wasn't sure he really was following her. He just creeped her out. The way he toyed with his iphone, ostensibly working on his own book. This was a write-in, after all. But was he seriously supposed to be making progress on a novel on that tiny screen? And the way his thick, clumsy fingers jabbed out letters one by one, and he mouthed along, silently reading his own text aloud. She could almost make out...

... something waxy poking from his bag... something white and waxy. Surely it couldn't be... yes, it was! It was a chunk of Swaledale cheese!

Who could this mystery man be?

Martha was determined to find out.