Assistant Professor Helps Kick Off National Novel Writing Month

Andrea Shaw, Ph.D., assistant professor and assistant director in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences Division of Humanities, celebrated the start of National Novel Writing Month on November 1, 2009, with a keynote speech at the Alvin Sherman Library.

November is known to aspiring and experienced writers alike as National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo”). During NaNoWriMo, writers are encouraged to pen a 50,000-word novel within the confines of the 30-day month, a challenging yet rewarding task for those interested in pouring their thoughts into a manuscript.

Speaking to about 30 prospective authors on the first day of NaNoWriMo, Shaw discussed the challenges of being a writer and the need to treat the activity as a sort of “sacred endeavor.”“So many of us who write are very disoriented and distraught when we don’t,” Shaw added. “We must treat our writing as a sacred ritual, one that helps sustain us and breathe life into us.”

Shaw also spoke about the basics of fiction writing and about plot, character development, and point of view. She concluded with a visualization exercise in which participants encounter and chat with a character from their novel—upcoming or current.

In addition to her Caribbean Literature class, Shaw also teaches a Fiction Writing Workshop course as part of the college’s M.A. in Writing program, offered within the Division of Humanities. She is the author of the 2006 book The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies and the essay “Big Fat Fish: The Hypersexualization of the Fat Female Body in Calypso and Dancehall,” which published in 2007’s Music, Memory, and Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean Literary Imagination. For more on National Novel Writing Month, visit http://www.nanowrimo.org/.