The student news site of Davis High School

The Dart

The student news site of Davis High School

The Dart

The student news site of Davis High School

The Dart

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    Writer’s take on a challenge

    November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is an online novel writing competition that anyone can participate in. It’s a fun, creative, and challenging way to practice writing skills for all participants.

        To be able to win, participants have to write 50,000 words in 30 days. All throughout the month of November members of NaNoWriMo try their hardest to come up with a 50,000 word novel on anything they want.
    Megan Burton, president of Writers’ Academy, encourages any student to participate in NaNoWriMo. Although members of Writers’ Academy are the students who make up most of Davis’ participation in NaNoWriMo, Burton said anyone can participate. She said she is trying to get as many people as she can involved with NaNoWriMo. Burton said it’s really fun for the kids who love to write stories. It’s free and a great way to be creative. The NaNoWriMo website says, “Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.”

    NaNoWriMo, Burton said, is very time-consuming but worth it to develop more writing skills. “I’ve tried [to compete ] for the past two years, but I’ve always gotten too busy, but [finishing all 50,000 words] is my goal this year,” Burton said.

                Alyssa Utley, who participated in her first year of NaNoWriMo in 2011, managed to write the whole 50,000 words in one month. She said writing the story is a lot of work, but you can plan your story and write a whole outline on your concept before November, but you can’t actually start your story until November 1st.
    Utley discovered that writing a story in 30 days was hard work, but she said if you really like the concept of your story, then the hard work can be fun. Utley wrote a dystopian story about a young woman who is “basically trying to overthrow a society that looks down on imperfection.”
    Utley explained that the way to keep up with your novel in the 30 days you have is to “stay on track–you have to write about 1700 words a day, which would take about two hours.”
    Burton says “a bunch of people are on task enough to finish their novel,” for NaNoWriMo, but it’s really hard if you’re busy like she is. She explains that NaNoWriMo is called “thirty days and nights of literary abandon” for a reason.

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