We often talk about writing as being a solitary pursuit. We celebrate the lonely artist in a garret, poring over the work. The image of the scribe using their own blood as ink features prominently in the mythos.
Then there’s NovelRama. If you missed it, you missed a four-day party of people at all stages of their careers. Some members of RMFW. Some not. Some beginners. Some veterans. We organized sprints for morning, afternoon, evening, and even some late nighters. We put up pep-talk videos. We encouraged people to just have fun with words. Hammer them out with abandon.
You’ve probably heard of National Novel Writing Month—NaNoWriMo—where the goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Hundreds of thousands of writers around the world participate each November. We laughed at four weeks. We were shooting for half that amount in four days.
Not everybody made it, but enough did to prove it’s not as crazy as some might think.
The real winners were those new writers who joined the fun, participated in the group sprints, and laughed with the multitude of lama and llama memes. The people who go the most out of it were those writers who, at least for one long weekend, abandoned the lonely artist mentality and brought their best game to the party. People who had struggled to get 1,000 words a day were hitting three or four times that and more. They left the weekend with a different perspective on what writing could be once they left their preconceived notions behind.
This was the third year for NovelRama. Each year we get more organized. Each year it gets bigger. Each year we end the weekend with a sense of accomplishment and celebration for helping writers—especially new writers—over the threshold and into a new way of life. It doesn’t matter how you publish, or even if you publish. What matters is committing to the writing, to putting the words on the page. To deciding that “this hour, I’m going to write.”
We’ll be doing it again in the fall. If you haven’t already, maybe you’ll join us.
I had signed up and fully intended to devote the four days to new writing, then ended up working on novel revisions and editing instead. Hopefully I’ll be working on a new project by the time the next NovelRama takes place. Working at the same time as a group of writers, even when the effort is online, does work. Making the 25,000 word goal would be great, but any word count is progress!
These are valuable events providing the impetus for many writers to write, and hopefully to write well. The image of the lonely artist in the attic hunched over a table, however, is not the opposite of such a thing. Never knew an artist who was lonely. An artist carries a phantasmagoria of acquaintances, friends, and environments with them constantly, most clearly seen and experienced when the artist hunches over that table. Maybe solitary is the right word. Nevertheless, solitary doesn’t necessarily mean lonely.