Get Your Write On: Books Written During NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)

Today is the first day of November, and that also means it’s the first day of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month)! All across the country, people from a wide range of ages and backgrounds are scribbling and typing away as they try to crank out 50,000 words before the month ends.

While the focus of NaNoWriMo is on quantity rather than quality, there are books that were banged out over a frenzied November that went on to become published. Here are a few such books with teen appeal.

Persistence of Memory by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Diagnosed with schizophrenia as a child, sixteen-year-old Erin has spent half of her life in therapy and on drugs, but now must face the possibility of weird things in the real world, including shapeshifting friends and her “alter,” a centuries-old vampire.

The Compound by S.A. Bodeen (among YALSA’s 2009 Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers and 2009 Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults)
After his parents, two sisters, and he have spent six years in a vast underground compound built by his wealthy father to protect them from a nuclear holocaust, fifteen-year-old Eli, whose twin brother and grandmother were left behind, discovers that his father has perpetrated a monstrous hoax on them all.

Livvie Owen Lived Here by Sarah Dooley
Fourteen-year-old Livvie Owen, who has autism, and her family have been forced to move frequently because of her outbursts, but when they face eviction again, Livvie is convinced she has a way to get back to a house where they were all happy, once.

Running for My Life by Ann Gonzalez
At 14, Andrea McKane struggles to cope with her mother’s schizophrenia. She’s facing the heartbreaking fact that her previously loving mother has vanished into her disease, possibly forever.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (a 2007 Alex Award winner)
When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town.

Losing Faith by Denise Jaden
Brie tries to cope with her grief over her older sister Faith’s sudden death by trying to learn more about the religious “home group” Faith secretly joined and never talked about with Brie or her parents.

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year?

– Gretchen Kolderup, currently reading Justice by Jim Krueger, Alex Ross, and Doug Braithwaite