“Time spent writing is never wasted.”

Rebecca Nowacek reflected on this brief but meaningful motto ever since she first heard it from her education mentor Lee Shulman in 2005. Now, an associate English professor and director of the Ott Memorial Writing Center on campus, Nowacek used the advice as inspiration to start the first ever month specifically dedicated to writing at Marquette.

Inspired by National Novel Writing Month, a popular nation-wide event known as NaNoWriMo, Marquette University Writing Month, or MarqUWriMo, gives students, faculty, staff and members of the surrounding community an opportunity to explore their love for the craft.

While the typical goal of NaNoWriMo is a 50,000-word novel, MarqUWriMo lets participants set their own goals, including completing academic papers, short stories or poetry collections.

The idea for the event came from the overwhelming response from the Writing Center’s 50-word short story contest last month.

“We were so delighted and struck by (its success),” Nowacek said. “We got a bunch of entries from every part of the university – undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, staff, administrators, all disciplines and professions you can think of, and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s so much excitement around writing and not enough opportunities for people to know that there are all these other people on campus who are interested in writing.’”

As part of the event, the Writing Center will sponsor several workshops throughout the month-long event that began with its kickoff last Friday. The events aim to let writers come together, sharpen their skills and support each other.

“It’s hard sometimes to make the time in your schedule for (writing) so I think there’s something that’s really cool about this one month event where there’s a whole community of people (who are all writing),” Nowacek said. “… It validates that choice. It says, ‘Yes, you should invest your time,’… and also sometimes writing is kind of lonely, so it’s nice to have a bunch of people doing this at once and connecting online and connecting face to face so that you can support each other.”

Participants in the event include professors, students and Marquette staff.  The diversity of participants is one thing English professor and Writing Center tutor Katie Barnhart likes most about MarqUWriMo.

“We want to get more people involved from different discourses, different departments, and different majors,” Barnhart said. “… We want more people in the engineering school, or the sciences or nursing or things like that to get involved, you know, work on their writing. Everyone has to write.”

Chris Gioia, president of the Marquette Writing Society and a senior in the College of Buisness Administration, believes that a structured event like MarqUWriMo will help campus writers organize their ideas for better stories and creative writing.

“It doesn’t force them to write, but – it kinda forces them to write,” he said. “I think it’s so important just to get ideas down on a page. Even if you have them in your head, there’s something different about putting them down and making them legitimate.”

Gioia’s goals for the month include revising his first novel that revolves around a mentally ill man who commits crimes. He plans to use the novel to make a broader statement about the American political structure, focusing on minorities and low-income families.

The College of Engineering curriculum doesn’t give another participant, freshman Madison Olesen, many opportunities to hone his writing skills. He signed up for MarqUWriMo to take a break from circuit boards and calculus.

“I enjoy writing,” he said.” It’s a creative outlet. It just kinda clears my mind and it’s a stress reliever.”

Olesen wrote 12,000 words for NaNoWriMo last year but hopes to reach the 50,000-word goal with his sci-fi/spy novel again this November.

“Some of the best things come out when you think it’s bad,” Olesen said. “But when you go back later or you revise it, it’s much better than you thought. So even if you’re at a roadblock, just keep pressing away at it. Keep your head down and push through.”

Straying from the conventional novel-writing, Krystal Morales, a freshman in the College of Communication, plans to write an episode of a sitcom for her MarqUWriMo contribution.

“My problem is that I watch too much TV, and I don’t write enough,” she said. “So I’m trying to tone down the watching and start writing.”

Though she is only a freshman, Morales has ambitions to write an entire TV series.

“I don’t know what makes a good TV show good, because if you think about it, most of the good sitcoms that have been really popular, they’ve been about nothing!” she said. “’Seinfeld’s’ about nothing, ‘Friends’ is about nothing. At least for a good TV show, and for books too, even more than the storyline, I think you have to fall in love with the characters and visualize them as friends. If you feel close to the characters, you’re going to feel whatever they’re going through and understand and get more involved.”

Carole Burns, director of the Wakerly Technology Training Center, has wanted to write a novel for several years, but decided to take the plunge with the encouragement of faculty. She is working on what she calls a “training manual” for living with adults with autism titled “I’m Making This Up,” using her own experiences with her son, Andy, as a guide. She hopes to get the work published so other parents in her position can learn from her.

“There are books out there by people who have autism, who are very articulate and who have written even with the use of a ghost writer or on their own,” she said. “But from a parent’s standpoint, I think it’s a different beast because not only are you trying to understand a disability that’s kind of foreign to you, you’re also trying to make other people understand it as well.”

A month of profuse writing may take a lot of time and dedication, but these aspiring writers can be sure of one thing – the time spent achieving their writing goals will surely not be wasted.