Exam season is coming to a close and November is drawing ever closer.
I used to consider November to be somewhat of a nothing month, a time between school or university ending and Christmas.
But scratch the surface and November becomes so much more.
November has come to be 30 days of punishment, desperation and eventual triumph.
For me, for the last two years, November has been National Novel Writing Month.
November is now the time when I ask myself why anyone would write a novel.
In fact, November is generally when I ask myself why humans even do this sort of thing at all, why we're so desperately eager to record whatever pops up in our funny little minds.
In 1999, 21 people in the San Francisco Bay Area decided they were going to write 50,000 words of a novel in the space of a month.
This was the birth of National Novel Writing Month.
The rules of National Novel Writing Month are simple and loose.
All you have to do is write a piece of fiction starting on November 1 and finishing on November 30, whether or not you have reached the end of your narrative.
The minimum word count is 50,000 words.
When you have finished you copy and paste your novella into word-counting software on the website and, if you've hit the target, you are officially declared a winner and are rewarded with a flashing, electronic certificate.
The second year there were 140 participants and a single organiser counted the number of words in each novel to determine the winners.
Now there are over 300,000 participants worldwide.
Chris Baty, the founder and organiser of National Novel Writing Month, claims that initially there was no reason for this madness other than to ''make noise''.
I am a huge proponent of making creative noise, no matter how silly.
Noise is good and cathartic.
It is especially good when you have an audience.
While there mightn't ever be an audience for what you regurgitate on to the page during November, there is a pretty charming sense of community.
Our propensity to share whatever we're thinking, whenever we are thinking it, has resulted in plethora of online platforms where participants in National Novel Writing Month share their thoughts and experiences.
I wonder every year why I do this to myself, right after a busy semester.
When I am curled in my bed on November 30, 17,000 words short of the word count, I will remember to ask myself every five minutes why I am writing 1000 words every hour for a stupid certificate.
But when said stupid certificate flashes on the screen, there is an overwhelming sense of smug satisfaction, a kind of bizarre gratification in producing such a body of writing for no discernible reason within a more or less self-imposed time frame.
I guess you could say that National Novel Writing Month is about making noise for yourself.
Maybe it is proving to yourself that you can make some kind of noise, even if it is 50,000 words you will never revisit and an absurd amount of nonsense fed to your Twitter followers in a desperate attempt to avoid putting words on the page.
Even if it's not some abstract desire to make noise or prove something to yourself, there's something quite nice in gloating about your excellent self-motivation and time management skills.
-Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
