The room is filled with the din of keyboard keys, the ding of a defiant typewriter coming to the end of its line, and the occasional burst of laughter as someone leaned into a read a line. To the casual observer, the conference room at the Salem Public Library would look like nothing more than a bunch of writers working away. However, this group is different.
It's November, and for over 200,000 writers worldwide, it is NaNoWriMo time, where daring writers take the month to write 50,000 words on a novel. And for members of the mid-Willamette valley, meetings such as these offer a chance for NaNo'ers, as they are called, to gather, share their stories, goof off, and get some much needed time into their word counts.
NaNoWriMo first started in July of 1999, when a group of 21 writers in the San Francisco Bay area decided to try something new, and set out to challenge themselves to write a short novel quickly, allowing in the rush of trying to meet a seemingly impossible deadline for the ideas to flow freely and without censorship. The next year, the group came together, choosing to move the event to its new home of November, and opened a website. From that day forward, the number of participants have steady grown into a worldwide phenomenon, with over 2.8billion words written during the 2010 event alone.
Moreover, as the event has grown, so too has the yearly meetings with the Salem NaNo region. What once was only ten people sitting at a table in a room at Chemeketa Community College, the growing popularity of the event means the Salem Region, once only one of a handful in Oregon, now boasts nearly 900 members, with hundreds coming to the many write-ins hosted throughout the month of November.
***more to come as I continue to finish transcription of interviews, and work on fleshing out the rest of the article.***
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