Sophia Venetos, 22, of Lincolnwood, IL., recently wrote and entered a novel into a contest. Her young adult/coming of age novel is the official winner of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) contest. Sophia works as an editor, thus, writing is both her vocation and passion.
NaNoWriMo is a “fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing” and is billed as “30 days and nights of writing abandon.” For the annual contest, participants begin writing on November 1, ultimately completing a 50,000 word novel by midnight on November 30. For being selected, she received a Winner’s Certificate and an official “Winner” web badge.
“The real prize is the sense of accomplishment that you feel when you’ve finally reached 50,000 words,” Sophia shared. “Knowing that you were able to not only write a novel, but that you were able to stick with it for an entire month – I think that’s a reward in itself.” In 2009, more than 165,000 writers participated in the contest, with about 30,000 completing the task.
She called it a “grueling process.” “In terms of writing, I consider myself relatively creative, but this month was definitely a real test. . But it’s all worth it once you get to that special scene you’ve been waiting for. Then the sentences seem to write themselves, and before you know it, you’ve already passed your word count for the day.” According to the web site, the contest is structured in this way, as “the kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.”
The winner had heard about the contest when she noticed that NaNoWriMo was trending on Yahoo in October. She clicked through the link and found more information. “I didn’t have a plot or story in mind, so I just kind of winged it at first. Once I figured out the gist of what I was trying to do, I didn’t worry about how strong the writing was; I just did my best to get the words out of my mind and onto the page.”
The young writer also noted that the goal of the contest is to simply get writers in the habit of writing every day, and that at this stage, quantity rather than quality is emphasized. She says that 95% of it probably isn’t very good, however, “I can pride myself on the fact that there’s at least a little bit of magic within that other 5%. That’s my prize.”
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