Tina Haapala, Excuse Editor

It's that time of year again, when thousands of wannabe novelists challenge themselves to write a whole book in 30 days. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, started 11 years ago and now has a worldwide following. The general idea behind NaNoWriMo is to encourage writers to achieve a lofty word count goal: 50,000 words. The aspiring authors blow the dust off their calculators to forecast their daily targets. As they write, the NaNoWriMo site gives them a visual representation of their work: a bar graph showing them how close, or far away, they are to completing their "NaNoNovel". 50,000 words. If that goal is reached, you would have written a 200 page book! In one month! Sounds out of this world? Well, consider this: A journey of a thousand sentences begins with a single word. Any writing, whether it's War and Peace or a simple tweet , starts with a blank slate. The mystery and the joy of composition: pulling words out of the air, one by one, to give bi...