NORWICH – For the month of November, Norwich Middle School (NMS) students in Mrs. Marsh and Ms. McGinnis' English classes are participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo): an annual, worldwide challenge that invites students and educators to draft an entire novel in just 30 days.

While writing a novel is a seemingly daunting task over the period of one month, the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program empowers students to set individualized and challenging word-count goals while encouraging students to write about any topic they please.

The purpose of NaNoWriMo is multi-faceted: to encourage students to write about topics that interest them, to make students more excited about writing, to help improve students' writing skills, and to show students all they can accomplish when they are determined.

Students in Mrs. Marsh and Ms. McGinnis' seventh and eighth grade English classes have begun drafting their novels, and each class is incentivized to write more words than the other class.

After just two days, some students have already begun developing their creative voices.

Seventh grader Maddie Lawrence is drafting a story based on a hockey player who is traded to his rival team. The hockey players' new teammates aren't very fond of their former rival in Lawrence's story, and eventually a bad accident occurs involving an ice skate. Lawrence said she is hoping to write 5,000 words in her novel this month.

Seventh grader Alex Newman is writing about a city-dweller named Bob who ends up getting stranded in the desert for a whole week. Over the course of Newman's goal of 4,000 words, Bob is charged with learning how to survive outside of his normal city life before it's too late.