First rule of write club — don’t talk about write club. This is the first semester of Write Club, founded by first-year College students Jessica Hatch and Anna Kovatcheva. The pair began the club to support participants of National Novel Writing Month, or for those who are in the know, “NaNoWriMo”.
NaNoWriMo is as intimidating as it sounds. Dedicated writers commit themselves to writing 50,000 words during the month of November — roughly the size of a novella. Participants are encouraged to write about 5,000 words every three days. By the end of the month writers will have finished a 175-page, double-spaced, novel.
Hatch and Kovatcheva met while at orientation and realized they were both creative writers, Kovatcheva recounted. They began the club with NaNoWriMo in mind, knowing it would help to have other students’ support and interest. The process began in October, otherwise known as “boot camp” month.
October was filled with preparation in terms of developing quick writing skills and brainstorming plot and character development. Some activities involved the pair sending out daily prompts. They would ask club members to write 500 words the first week, and increase it by 500 more words each week until members were able to write 2,000 words in a day. This put them in an ideal position for writing in November. Hatch described how she would take advantage of the prompts by writing “character descriptions and what my plot was going to be.”
When November came, the group continued biweekly meetings but also paired up members for an added boost of support. “It’s like going to the gym,” Kovatcheva said. “Once you’re there you’re fine, but you need to get there.” Other activities in November include a “stress-relieving pillow fight” on the Lawn with lunch on the Corner afterward.
Write Club consists of 12 members currently. Hutch and Kovatcheva seemed fairly pleased with the size, saying they do not want it to become too much larger than the size of a creative writing class. The group includes people who have been aspiring NaNoWriMo writers for some time, along with first-year College student Alexandra Staeben — a NaNoWriMo veteran who has written 50,000 words during the month of November for the past 5 years.
Earlier this year, Staeben met Hutch while participating in Shakespeare on the Lawn. “It was nice to meet someone else who knew about NaNoWriMo,” Staeben said. A participant in NaNoWriMo since the eighth grade, Staeben is an aspiring “young adult fiction writer.” She has found this program to be “inspiring and motivating ... You have to be a little crazy [to do it] though.”
NaNoWriMo began in 1999 in San Francisco. Essentially NaNoWriMo is “about getting the first draft on paper,” Hutch said. Sometimes the stuff you produce is “absolute crap, [but] you can revise in December,” Hutch said. “People have actually had published novels come out of this.”
After so much dedication “I hope I don’t shove my novel in a drawer and never think about it again,” Kovatcheva said.
With so much practice writing, members can write their target of about 2,000 words each day at an increasing pace. It takes Staeben about 1.5 to two hours to finish her writing goal each day, but Hutch said she has been able to cut her writing time down to about 45 minutes.
Considering it has hardly been around for a semester, Write Club has had considerable success giving aspiring writers support for NaNoWriMo. The duo hopes the club will expand to include more activities. The club has planned celebrations for the end of November and hopes to include activities such as open mic nights. Hutch expressed her hope that eventually Write Club might become a “mainstay at U.Va."
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
