Photo credit: Heidi Ross
Every November I’m dumbfounded by the international phenomenon of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, as it’s commonly called. I’m not a novelist, but even if I could actually write a novel, I’m definitely not capable of writing an entire novel in a single month, much less in the short, holiday-interrupted month of November.
Nevertheless, I perked up in 2014 when my friend Susannah Felts — novelist and cofounder of Nashville’s nonprofit literary center, The Porch Writers’ Collective — put out an open call on Facebook for a NaNoWriMo accountability group. Unlike the real NaNoWriMo, Susannah’s version of accountability involved no word-count targets. The rules were simple: We would each do our own writing by whatever rules we set out for ourselves...