Check out the Chicago Tribune tomorrow!

Hey everybody! Last weekend, I was interviewed about Nanowrimo for the Tribune and it's running tomorrow (Saturday the 24th)!!!

I've attended some of the Chicago region's events at the Oakton Community College and the reporter got in touch with me through the teacher who runs them. It's a great story with a bunch of other people interviewed too, including Grant Faulkner!

Check it out if you like. It should be in tomorrow's Chicago Tribune or you can check it out online: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-novel-month-20121124,0,1714296.story

-Sam

Excellent article--thanks for sharing and congratulations for appearing in print!

--Tim

What a great article!

Dave

WRITE EARLY; WRITE OFTEN!

Can anyone copy and paste the article?
You can't read it without being a member and I do not want to sign up for another thing that will go to my email.

PBJ63010 wrote:
Can anyone copy and paste the article?
You can't read it without being a member and I do not want to sign up for another thing that will go to my email.

I don't believe you have to be a member to read the article; but here are a few parts that I liked:

Quote:Chicago is a hotbed of ambitious wordsmiths, with nearly 10,000 people from the city and suburbs participating in the free online contest. Naperville, counted as a separate region, has 2,200 participants of its own. One of them is Sam Brown, 23, a freelance artist who is on her second attempt.

She succeeded last year, writing a story about an adventurous gnome named Basil Wanderlust. This year, she's a bit behind schedule with an account of a boy who is mysteriously transformed into a cat. Still, she's confident she'll hit her number by the end despite her usually laborious means of production.

"I'm handwriting (the story) this year," said Brown, who lives in Norway, in LaSalle County, but is participating with the Naperville region. "Today's culture is so instant, so it is really satisfying to create something that takes that much effort. Typed words don't feel personal, but if I see my handwriting, it's really gratifying. It's like I really accomplished something that's tangible."

and

Quote:But Stacy Stusowski, 29, a Carpentersville attorney who has been doing the contest since 2007, said such criticism misses the point. NaNoWriMo isn't about producing polished gems: It's about creating the raw material from which a gem might someday emerge.

...

"I never would have done it if I didn't have (the encouragement NaNoWriMo provides)," she said. "When I finished, there was a lot of crap there, but I was also surprised at how good a lot of it was, because I wasn't overthinking it. There's a real value in turning off your inner editor. There's going to be some bad stuff, but there will also be some stuff you can't believe you came up with."

Shawn Shiflett, a novelist who teaches fiction writing at Columbia College, hasn't participated in the contest but said any snarkiness aimed at it is unwarranted. He has learned through experience that it's impossible to tell who might be capable of greatness on the page, and if NaNoWriMo can bring new talent to the surface, so much the better.

Even if nothing comes of participants' efforts, he said, they should be respected for giving it a try.

"If I go to a cocktail party and say I'm a writer, I'll bet 1 in 4 people say, 'I've got a story that should be a book.' How many actually do it?" Shiflett said. "These people deserve support. They're in the writing community."

Well written!