Road Trip to NaNo: Fill Every Space with Creativity

NaNoWriMo is an international event, and the stories being written every year reflect our hundreds of participating regions. We’re taking a Road Trip to NaNo to hear from our amazing volunteers and writers all around the world. Today, Lauren Mitchell, our Municipal Liaison in the Melbourne region shares her experience of helping create a NaNo community:

Melbourne has always been driven by a strong creative spirit. Named one of UNESCO’s Cities of Literature in 2008, the city hosts the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Fringe Festival, and the International Comedy Festival, among numerous other artistic and literary endeavours. Packed with street art and quaint cafés, rich with library networks, and buoyed up by the creative spirits of thousands of people, Melbourne’s artistic heart beats strongly.

When I started volunteering with NaNoWriMo as a Municipal Liaison in 2009, we were only tapping into a fraction of that creative spirit…

I’d thrown myself in the deep end by opting to ML solo, when the region previously had two MLs. But I love my city, and I love all the places around it that can provide so much inspiration, so I was determined to try and get more events up and running across the city and as widespread as possible to try to get as many people involved as I could. More and more people were showing up to events and talking about how fantastic it was to meet other Wrimos in person. That energy was something I wanted to support.

Since then, we’ve had so many write-ins in so many different spaces. Libraries, office buildings, cafés, food courts, people’s homes, and more, have held Wrimo gatherings. We’ve had write-ins with four people hanging out in someone’s living room, and we’ve had write-ins with 50 people spread out in an office building in South Melbourne. Some of them are more productive than others, but all of those spaces, big or small, have been filled with that creative spirit.

I guess the message I want people to take away from this is to use the spaces you have available to foster community writing. Not every writers’ gathering has to be a big one. And while you’re thinking about how to use the spaces you have, don’t forget the most important one of all: the space on the page in front of you. That is the most important space to fill. As Jodi Picoult wrote, “You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.” 

Melbourne’s NaNoWriMo Kick-off Party

Lauren Mitchell has been NaNo-ing since 2003. She is currently undertaking a Master of Communication at RMIT University as well as working for Ticketmaster Australia. She holds a BA in Creative Writing and Psychology, and a Grad Dip in Editing and Publishing. She was the winner of the 2014 ASFF Amateur Short Story Award. Her 2007 NaNo-novel, The Fear Collectors , has been accepted by Satalyte Publishing. Her 2011 NaNo-novel, retitled The Triad Trial , has been accepted by Less Than Three Press and is now available for pre-order.

Top photo by Flickr user 4yas.