NaNoWriMo-Mania

Dannee McGuire talks about the intense experience of writing a novel in a month…

Alongside your average essay word count of 2,000 or 3,000 words, could you imagine writing 1,667 extra words a day… For 30 days? That’s what NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is all about: challenging people to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of November. I’m about to embark on this challenge for the third time.

NaNoWriMo began in 1999, surging from 21 people to over 260,000 as of 2013, under dynamic founder Chris Baty. NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought fleetingly about writing a novel. The website offers prospective writers the infrastructure to track and display every word they add to their fledging masterpieces, with certificates offered to those novelists who finish by 23.59 on 30 November.

My first NaNoWriMo experience was in 2006. Having found out about the competition half way through November, I ran helter-skelter into it on the 12th, enthusiastically scribbling over 3000 words a day as I nudged my heaps of GCSE coursework out of the way. 18 days later, with a not so insignificant bout of Repetetive Strain Injury, I was the proud owner of my first novel. If you could call it a novel. It was a topsy-turvy jumble of scenes, prospective opening lines, snippets of character development plots, all out of sequence, and not proofed in any way. After completing it, I looked at it in despair and shoved it into the bottom of a baseless folder, never to see the light of day.

Yet that’s the whole point of NaNoWriMo. It doesn’t promise its writers a perfectly crafted work of art by the end of the month, but instead offers a foot in the door and a boost of confidence to tackle what many consider as the most inhibiting factor of a writer’s life: writing anxiety. “NaNoWriMo is an unbeatable way to write the first draft of a novel because it’s such a powerful antidote to that horrible foe of creativity: self- doubt,” says Grant Faulkner, Executive Director. “NaNoWriMo is a rollicking conversation about all aspects of writing, and an invitation to dare to do what seems impossible.”

My second novel, completed in 2007, was a slightly calmer affair. Yet since then, I’ve been hindered by the second, twinned Achilles heel of the budding novelist: procrastination. That’s where the collaboration side of NaNoWriMo comes in. The website offers a comprehensive forum for writers to find answers to all their questions, post their daily targets and gather writing research. For those who prefer more instant forms of communication, there are chatrooms and other forms of live chat for ‘word wars’ (the term referring to intensely writing as many words as possible within twenty minutes). Face-to-face options are also available. NaNoWriMo have local meetups within Exeter, where writers can meet for a coffee or a drink. But more instantly for students, the Exeter Creative Writing group since last year has supported NaNoWriMo writers. Every weekend from 2-4pm, you can find a flock of students taking over a table in the A&V Hub armed with their laptops. Biscuits and tea are available for members to join, although the society kindly requests for people to bring their own mugs.

With such a strong local and global support system, NaNoWriMo looks set to make another 341,375 or more writers into novelists this year, as they did in 2012. With no plot or ideas, I’m all set to spend 30 minutes a day scraping together another haphazard novel this year (1667 non-academic words per day really doesn’t take too long!). Who’s up for joining me on the challenge?

Dannee McGuire

 

How are universities portrayed in fiction?

Sophie Beckett, Online Books Editor, looks at what freshers can learn about the modern university experience from novels…

Photo Credit: francisco_osorio

If you’re heading off to university for the first time this September, there’s every chance that this will be one of the biggest changes in your life so far. It can be difficult to know what to expect, or how to prepare. In any challenging situation, many a reader of the Books section will reach immediately for a trusty paperback for guidance. But what do books have to say about universities?

There is, of course, a burgeoning market in self-help books related to choosing, applying for and even attending university. These are full of factual information, guidance on writing personal statements and enough league tables to satisfy even the most statistics-addicted 17 year olds. They undoubtedly have their uses. However, in order to read about the nature of the experience itself, it is necessary to look past the practical guidance and see what fiction has to offer.

One of the first books that comes to mind is Starter for Ten, by David Nicholls. Published in 2003 but set in 1985, this tells the story of Brian Jackson, a student arriving at an unnamed university fresh from his working-class home in the seaside town of Southend, Essex. Brian has long been a fan of the television quiz show University Challenge, and soon finds himself competing on the show as a member of his own university’s team. Beneath the story of the ups and down of the team’s performance and the relationships between the teammates lies a deeper struggle; Brian’s attempts to reconcile his new life with his working-class background. The myriad opportunities that campus life offers for comedy are not lost on Nicholls. Brian’s story is in many ways autobiographical, and Nicholls has confessed to being whilst at university, in his own words, ‘a bit of a prat’.

Starter for Ten stands out not just because it’s an enjoyable read and, I am reliably informed, an accurate depiction of university life in the 80s, but also because novels about students at British universities are seemingly very rare. There are plenty of books which follow the experiences of students at US colleges, including an entire sub-genre of ‘campus murder mystery’ novels, of which Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a particularly fine example. But the US system is different in many ways, and representations of British student experiences in fiction are few and far between, as Nicholls himself points out in an article written for the Guardian. ‘It always seemed strange to me,’ Nicholls writes, ‘that such a poignant and widely shared experience should be written about so rarely’.

There have been British novels with a campus setting, but this tradition of the ‘campus novel’ tends to focus on faculty politics with only a reluctant reference to students occasionally thrown in. Well-known examples of the tradition include Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis and the novels of David Lodge. These have a sharply comic edge, poking fun at the pretensions of academic staff, and also engage with the politics surrounding universities at the time they were written. However, even this form of writing set in universities is now less common; Howard Jacobson argues that this is due to a fear on behalf of authors of appearing elitist, saying ‘although half the country goes to campuses.. everybody is embarrassed to talk about it’.

Whatever the reasons behind this lack of novels about students, it seems surprising. A good proportion of writers active today have attended university; a good proportion of people who have attended university would say it has influenced who they have later become. So why, when there are more than enough good novels written about love, break-ups, job stresses, family troubles, growing up and so on, are there so few that deal with such an important life event as being a student?

Starter for Ten is an excellent portrayal of university life 30 years ago, with its unique politics and fashions and set of circumstances. However the student experience has changed almost beyond recognition in the years since then, not least with the introduction of cripplingly large tuition fees. The conflicts and pressures and joys of modern university life are perfect material for exploration in fiction. This is clearly a book that at some point in the future needs to be written, and who’s to say that 30 years down the line, it won’t be someone who started university this September writing it?

Sophie Beckett, Online Books Editor