NaNoWriMo

Grace Brown

1/12/24

NaNoWriMo is a complicated thing for many of the juniors and even some seniors; they have been tasked with making a novel. Both on-level English 3 and on-level English 4 are participating in this project. 

NaNoWriMo is a national competition that is hosted each year. There are 2 different sectors of NaNoWriMo, there is the student section and there is the adult section. There doesn’t sound like there is a big difference between the sections but there most definitely is. The difference is in the word count needed. The adult section needs about 50,000 words and the student section aims to have around 10,000 words or a little less than that. 

Mrs. Ciccariello’s classes did a project in NaNoWriMo and they had to write a short story using whatever prompt that they chose. The projects ranged from an old time roman empire story to a love story that took place in today’s society. There was lots of variety in this project because each student got to choose their own story!

The NaNoWriMo competition has been operating since 1999 and it has only gotten more widespread and popular since then. Almost 413,000 people competed in the competition this year and that number will hopefully continue to rise within the next couple of years. Only 20 people competed in the competition in the year 1999.

Although the competition has only been around for about 25 years, the rate that it is growing at is incredible because of computers. The tech industry has been massively impactful to NaNoWriMo as well because it has put the competition online so that they can have a more widespread audience. They have also been able to reach a lot more people by putting it on the computer because they can do advertising at a level that they weren’t able to do before.

In conclusion, the use of computers has been a very crucial part of the boom in NaNoWriMo. There are so many topics that you can pick, from going from the building of spaceships to the specifics on how to bake so that you don’t accidentally burn your masterpiece or yourself. It was incredible to see the work that individual students do each and every day.

Photos By Jaiden C.