NanoWrimo

This is how Glenn’s connection with Nano Wrimo started. Glenn was writing a book on ethics, and it got bogged down. He was bored with it; he couldn’t see the point. One of his sons, Rohan, had got excited about this thing called Nano Wrimo, and he kept telling Glenn about it. Glenn said he wasn’t interested; he wasn’t writing a novel. But Rohan persisted.

What is Nano Wrimo? It’s short for “National Novel Writing Month. The “National” part is not true. It is global. The challenge is to write a novel in the month of November, the only criterion being that it has to be at least 50,000 words long, and the only prize is the right to buy a t-shirt that says you are a Winner. Somewhere around half a million people participate annually, around the world.

“I’m not writing a novel,” Glenn said. In the end, in what proved to be a crucial moment, Rohan replied, “Write it as a novel.” They were the magic words, and Glenn signed up on the website that day. This was the experience that led to The Ten Thousand Things.

Glenn liked the humour and lack of judgement in the NanoWrimo challenge. He also liked the intensity it generated, and the need to keep moving forward with the story rather than endlessly mulling over it and polishing the words. It was more like slam poetry, a performance, with the need to be in the moment and alert. The result was that the process called up long-silent memories and a clarity of vision.

It may look as if Glenn’s involvement in NanoWrimo ceased after 2014, but in fact he carried out the challenge in 2015 and 2017 as well, using it as the impetus to get started on two other books. A Modest Quest and The Search for Edward Lewis both got a kick-start this way.

As proof, the t-shirt for 2015 is shown above.