Want to write a book? You can if you've got 75 minutes spare

Every year, writers across the world struggle through the month of November to hit a seemingly impossible target: write a whole novel in 30 days. But National Novel Writing Month – or NaNoWriMo, as it’s known – will shortly look like child’s play, because on Saturday 8 August, science-fiction author Chris Farnell will lead “NaNoSessionMo”: an attempt to write an entire novel in 75 minutes.

The session (which, Farnell concedes, should perhaps be called NaNoWriSession) will take place at the Nine Worlds geekfest in Heathrow, a multidisciplinary convention for fans across the spectrum of geek culture, and was inspired by a previous panel Farnell led at 2014’s show.

“Last year, we did a session on writing science fiction on existing technology; trying to look at how science fiction works by writing science fiction about technology we already have. We had some great ideas coming out of it: people writing stories about post-apocalyptic crustaceans inventing tools, and that sort of thing.

“With just the quantity and ideas that people were coming up with, I thought absent-mindedly you could probably get them to write a book. And so when Megan [Rosslyn, who is co-running the creative writing track at Nine Worlds] was asking about sessions for this year, I put that forward as a completely ridiculous idea that couldn’t possibly work, and she ran with it. So now that’s happening.”

The idea is simple: the fifty or so attendees of the panel will spend about 45 minutes collaboratively hammering out a plot, characters and structure. Then, for the next half an hour, each of them will be given one chapter to write, and the results will be collected together, lightly edited, and published as a free ebook.

“Normally in exercises like this, you tend to give them much less time,” Farnell says. “If someone has ten minutes to write, they tend to go with the first idea they come up with, because they’ve not got time to have a second. And in that time, you get people coming up with 500–1000 words.”

As for what he hopes the outcome to be, Farnell says “I think coherent, legible and English is a good thing to aim for. This is more about whether it’s possible than about whether it’s going to be a good bit of literature.

“Absolute success would be if we end up with a story with a beginning middle and end, and you can read the whole thing without jarring too much. But to be honest, it’s not really about whether it’s going to succeed, or how good the book ends up being, as it is about what we learn by doing it.”