The University of Connecticut’s Creative Writing Club is currently looking for new writers in preparation for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) to begin. The club meets at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesdays in Room 105 in the Phillip E. Austin Building, and its members are beginning work on writing a 50,000-word novel for NaNoWriMo.
The president of the Creative Writing Club, third-semester animal science major Christina Broady, spoke about the club in an interview with the Daily Campus. Broady talked about the goals of the club and what they hope to accomplish.
“[The Creative Writing Club’s goal is] just to encourage people who want to write to do so. A lot of people feel as though they’re procrastinating with their work, or they don’t have enough time to do it, or some people believe that they just don’t know how to write and they lose a lot of like motivation to do so,” Broady said. “I want people to feel encouraged to dabble into writing, especially since writing is such a huge thing of communication and a huge medium in itself, and I feel like it’s so undervalued sometimes.”
Broady talked about how the club is currently preparing for members to participate in NaNoWriMo. As part of the event, members will try to write up a novel that is over 50,000 words in length.
“I know we’re probably not going to get all the way to [50,000 words], but we’re going to try to write something close to a novel all of next month. That’s what everyone’s been looking forward to a lot, so we’ve been trying to plan stories and planning out plot making and characters and all that,” Broady said. “We’ve just been planning a whole lot of stuff for everyone to show off their work and also be rewarded for it. I feel like a lot of people deserve to have the recognition for their writing and their stories.”
Currently the club is working on their Halloween writing contest. The club hosts a monthly themed writing contest, and for the month of October members “can either create a character sheet or they can write a 500-word scene or story including the monster itself,” according to Broady. At the end of the month, members will vote on whose story wins, and the winner will receive a prize filled with stationery and other writing-related items.
Broady encourages anybody who has an interest in writing to check out the club and see if writing is for them.
“If you have a story, I would recommend coming. It doesn’t even have to be this grand story that you’ve been thinking of since you were 12. If you have a story, if you want to write, if you want to get back into writing, or find your love of writing again. If you want to meet new people and find friends, if you’re in the English major… I want to make it open for everyone basically,” Broady said. “It’s writing, anyone can do it, you don’t have to be Shakespeare to do it, you can just write something on a piece of paper, and you can get critiques on it and have people read it.”
The club has other plans for the year, including continuing their monthly themed writing competitions and creating an anthology book filled with stories from club members. For more information about the club, anyone interested can visit the club’s Instagram at @uconncreativewritingclub, or visit their UConntact page.