Jesse Wright’s Template on Writing a Novel wins Project KickStart’s Contest

Nov. 19, 2010 - PRLog -- Berkeley, CA – November 16, 2010 – November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Jesse Wright’s template, Writing a Novel has been aptly chosen as winner of Project KickStart’s template competition.

NaNoWriMo is an annual novel writing project, open to anyone crazy enough (or with enough free time) to attempt writing 50,000 words (or 175 pages) of fiction in 30 days. Started in 1999 by a group of twenty-somethings who just wanted to make some noise, NaNoWriMo has grown to have 165,000 participants who together wrote 2.4 billion words last November. In forcing themselves to write intensely and under pressure, participants must allow themselves to make mistakes and keep going to the finish line. According to Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, creativity is fostered by environments which allow for such mistakes. Environments that produce our most innovative work often also produce “a lot of crap”, Johnson says. In accordance with this precept, of the 612,935 novels that have been attempted through NaNoWriMo, over the last 10 years, nearly 60 have been published, including Sara Guren’s acclaimed, Water for Elephants, a New York Times #1 Bestseller.

The official NaNoWriMo rules consist of only six bullet points - essentially, participants must write 50,000 words, themselves, in the month of November. Research, developing outlines, and character sketches are the only kinds of preparation participants can do before 12:01am on November 1st.

In honor of International Project Management Day (November 4th), a software company, Experience in Software sent out an open call to submit templates for their project management product, Project KickStart. Like the NaNoWriMo rules, the template contest rules were open ended; the Project KickStart team wanted to see what creativity their software could foster.

Project management is generally thought of as an ultimately corporate activity, performed by people titled Project Manager, cloistered in windowless offices, using complex software, and presenting charts in boring meetings. People think of environments like the space shown in Mike Judge’s 1999 eponymously named movie, Office Space.

Project Management doesn’t have to be this way (and often isn’t). We all manage projects every day, whether it’s planning an outing with friends, or turning an idea thought of while eating dinner into a successful business. Project KickStart sees project management broadly, and has created software to allow anyone to begin with just an idea, and end up with a cohesive plan.

Jesse Wright’s wining template, Writing a Novel, is a superb example of project management outside the stuffy corporate office and the kind of creative planning which can be done with the product. In her template, Wright takes readers from concept and character development, through plot twists, character epiphanies, and editing, all the way to publication. She breaks the steps in writing a novel down, into bite sized pieces.

Wright’s template is available for download on Project KickStart’s Templates Page (http://www.projectkickstart.com/downloads/prxdownload.cfm). Project KickStart offers a 20 day free trial. Use it to plan anything you dream of, available at http://www.projectkickstart.com.

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Through five versions of Project KickStart's project management software we've focused on keeping it easy to use. Our clients are planning and managing projects for general business, consulting, IT, government, education and more.