Do you have someone in your family who loves loves LOVES to write? Or maybe that someone is you! Well, you’re in luck; once again the Moline Public Library is hosting a special program for Young Writers through the NaNoWriMo (or National Novel Writing Month) Young Writers Program!
But what is NaNoWriMo? It’s exactly like their website describes:
“National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, empowering approach to creative writing. The challenge: draft an entire novel in just one month. Why do it? For 30 wild, exciting, surprising days, you get to lock away your inner editor, let your imagination take over, and just create!
To work on a novel, you can join an official event (like NaNoWriMo in November, or Camp NaNoWriMo in April and July), set a word-count goal, and try to reach it by the end of the month. The Young Writers Program allows participants to set individualized goals. 1,000 words? 10,000? 100,000??? It’s up to you! Use the progress-tracking tools on our site to stay on track. If no official event is happening, you can create a personal challenge with your own deadline for a new or existing project.”
And the best part? It’s completely free! You just can’t beat that!
“But wait!” I hear you cry, “I don’t know where to start! How can I possibly come up with a goal and meet it if I don’t know what I’m writing?” Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! For this year’s NaNoWriMo, we’ve separated our program into two different age groups: one for the Kindergarten-2nd grade writers, and one for the 3rd-5th grade writers! You can chat with your fellow writers on the dashboard and workshop ideas! Each week will have new writing prompts and ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
To write your book, you can work directly on the Young Writers Program website or use Word, Google Docs, or any other way to write and manually update your progress! As long as you are writing, you don’t have to log every day. But you do get some cool online badges for doing so.
At the very end of NaNoWriMo, if you happen to finish your novel, you can print it out and bring it in to the library to share with others, or even get it published directly from the NaNoWriMo website! Sadly, it does cost to publish your book, but not as much as you might think it does. If you have a full book ready to be printed, NaNoWriMo will print a paperback version of your book starting at $2.99! But it’s always more fun to print your own book. Or you might even keep it for yourself just because.
So what are you waiting for? You can sign up for the program here, type in one of the room codes below and start writing away! Remember, there are two chat rooms for grades K-2nd and 3rd – 5th graders.
The room codes are:
K-2nd Grade: OQZIPPCI
3rd – 5th Grade: YWVOLFZW
Moline Public Library Kids 