What Agents Say About National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

What Agents Say About National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)

For years I have heard about National Novel Writing Month and thought it might be something I would enjoy, but this is the first year I have researched the event. As I began considering participating, a million questions drilled into my brain seemingly all at once, so immediately I went to the National Novel Writing Month website for answers.

There I found great information about how NaNoWriMo started and the spirit of the event. Whether you have never written a novel before or have published works in the past, you are invited to be a part of the contest. The idea is that the event motivates you to write a novel (first draft anyway). You have to reach 50,000 words to be considered a winner.

Here is the breakdown of the rules directly taken from the How NaNoWriMo works page on their website:

• Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
• Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people’s works).
• Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you’re writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!
• Be the sole author of your novel. Apart from those citations mentioned two bullet-points up.
• Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.
• Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

What agents say about National Novel Writing Month:

Having gained the above understanding along with plenty of other good information on the NaNoWriMo website, I decided this could be a really great contest for me. Despite my excitement, I wondered if this event should simply be for fun, or if it would be something advantageous to my writing goals of publication. If after writing the novel for NaNoWriMo I were to decide I really like it and want to send it out to agents, would they want to know it was involved in NaNoWriMo? Fortunately, I follow a fantastic blog run by New Leaf Literary & Media, Inc., where the very generous agents answer writer’s questions of all kinds. Naturally, I took my quandaries to them.

So if you have found yourself in the same frame of thinking and would like to know exactly what agents think about NaNoWriMo, here is your answer: