With final exams looming and the pressure of assignments and essays mounting high, it's hard to imagine students who would volunteer for an extra 50,000-word assignment during the month of November.
They call themselves WriMos.
"I guess I like being challenged, especially when it's something I already love to do," said Cydney Lawson, freshman in education.
National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is celebrated annually in November.
Around the world, writers of all ages and skill levels commit to writing a 50,000-word novel--starting from scratch on Nov. 1.
Lawson said this is her second year participating in NaNoWriMo.
"I went to a writing camp at Duke University, and one of my friends was just ranting and raving about it," Lawson said. "As soon as I got back to school at the end of the summer, I started planning out and doing NaNoWriMo."
According to its website, NaNoWriMo was started in 1999. The first year, 21 people participated in the project, which was initially held in July.
This year, more than 200,000 novelists have picked up the gauntlet.
Clay Carswell, freshman in molecular biology, is also participating in NaNoWriMo for the second time.
"It sounded like it'd be fun, and I wanted to get my ideas out of my head," Carswell said.
NaNoWriMo is more about quantity than quality, but Carswell said it's still possible to write something worth reading during the 30-day period.
"If I'm going to write something over the course of a month, and I would have put the same ideas on paper over the course of a year and a half, it's not going to suddenly become better because I took a year and a half to write it all out," Carswell said.
That philosophy is confirmed by the NaNoWriMo success stories on the website, which lists more than 60 books that started as NaNoWriMo novels and are now published.
"Support your friends" was Lawson's advice to those who know someone attempting NaNoWriMo. "We are all going to die at some point in this month, and we need friends to just do the little Tinkerbell clap and bring us back to life."
Lawson and Carswell agreed the story isn't going to be perfect, but they did have some tips on how to keep it going.
"If your plot seems to die on you, just run with it," Carswell said.
"Use the shockers and bring it back to life," Lawson added. "Over and over again until it is a plot zombie."
"And if your plot starts at point A and ends at point Q, then, whatever works," Carswell said. "And if it never actually gets to point B, you know, that's fine. You don't need point B. Point Q is fine."
NaNoWriMo novelists have until midnight local time to upload their novels to the website for word count verification.
"Last year I won," Lawson said. "Nothing but bragging rights and the satisfaction of writing 50,000 words."
It may not seem like much of a prize, but for WriMos it's enough.
Local WriMos hold write-ins--meetings that encourage brainstorming and periods of focused writing to help writers reach the daily NaNo word count--twice weekly at Daylight Donuts and the Auburn Public Library.
Visit nanowrimo.org to find out more.
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