One month, one novel:

Library workshops prep writers for challenge

All bestsellers started out as blank pages, depending on the authors to use their skills with the written word to flesh out characters who would go on to drive the plots in engaging narratives.

That may or may not come as a consolation to any aspiring writers in or around Yuma who are trying to figure out how to start what they hope will be first novels.

Christine Howard and Melissa Stevens can help them get started. In fact, they’ll help them finish a novel in a month’s time.

Nov. 1 kicks off National Novel Writing Month, an annual internet-based creative writing project that helps authors jump-start their creativity and imagination by challenging them to pen 50,000-word fiction manuscripts before the end of the month.

Howard and Stevens — both published writers from the Yuma area — will teach a series of workshops to area residents who want to take up that writing challenge — or just want to pursue their dreams to write.

Offered at the Yuma Main and Foothills libraries, the free workshops will show participants how to create plots, settings and well-developed characters. The first workshop takes place from 3 to 4:30 p.m. today at the Foothills Library, 13226 E. South Frontage Road, and will be reprised Saturday at the Yuma Main Library, 2951 S. 21st Drive, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

As November approaches, the students can go to the National Novel Writing Month’s website, nanowrimo.org, to sign in to take part in the writing challenge.

No doubt there are people in the area who dream of writing the Great American Novel. But why would any one of them want to allot themselves a single month to do it?

The National Novel Writing Month project — also known as Na No Wri Mo — was started nearly to two decades ago in part to instill discipline in writers, Howard and Stevens say.

The project was conceived by Chris Baty, a writer who had learned what many other scribes have come discover: An author who has all the time in the world to write a novel may take exactly that much time to write it. At that rate, the book might end up not getting written.

But if a deadline is forced on writers — or if they have the discipline to impose deadlines on themselves — they learn to write on a schedule.

“The hard, fast deadline — this is what I have to meet — is motivating,” Stevens said. “You can’t make excuses if you have to make that deadline.”

With November being 30 days long, participants in Na No Wri Mo need to produce an average of 1,666 words a day to reach the 50,000-word goal.

“Obviously it’s a challenge, and you have to commit yourself to it,” Howard said.

Given the compressed schedule, participants have to focus on putting words down on paper – not on polishing every sentence and paragraph formed from those words.

And that’s OK, say Howard and Stevens, both of whom noted that author Ernest Hemingway once likened all first drafts to excrement.

“You can fix crap, but if you don’t write, you don’t have anything to fix,” said Howard.

Howard, a co-founder more than a decade ago of the Foothills authors club Write On The Edge, and Stevens have both taken up the month-long writing challenge. This is the third year in a row the two have taught the writing workshops at area libraries to prep local writers for the challenge.

A year ago, 51 area residents signed up for the challenge, with 27 of them writing 50,000-word manuscripts, Howard said. Internationally, she added, only 17 percent of participants successfully meet the commitment.

Most area residents who participate in the Na No Wri Mo are adults, but children and teens can also attend the workshops and take up the writing challenge, said Sarah Wisdom, the Yuma County Library District’s community relations manager.

The district joined in hosting in National Novel Writing Month, Wisdom said, “definitely to encourage our local writers to get involved and get their work out there.”

Apart from hosting the workshops, the libraries can provide quiet areas plus desktop and laptop computers for aspiring writers who have no other place to write, she said.

And, Wisdom added, the district also subscribes to SELF-e, a platform that allows local writers to upload their works as e-books that become available for reading by all card-holding patrons of Yuma County libraries. And if reviewers at SELF-e like a work well enough, they’ll make it available to other libraries around the country that also subscribe to the platform.

For more information or to sign up for the challenge, Yuma area residents should go to the National Novel Writing Month website, nanowrimo.org/

There is also a Facebook page for Yuma National Novel Writing Month.

“It’s a great way to get people started writing,” said Stevens.