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"I’ve Always Called Myself a Writer"

Jill Giambruno
Jill Giambruno

It’s mid-November, and Jill Giambruno, a first-year health science major, has a lot on her mind. Yes, there are papers and final projects to complete, and those are her top priority. But she’s also thinking about six college students spending a week together in a ski lodge—or maybe it’s a beach house? She hasn’t decided yet. The six students, a brother and sister and their friends, are characters in A Week Lost, a novel that Giambruno is writing as part of National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo, as it’s called, is a nonprofit that encourages people to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.

This year, some 400,000 writers from all over the world are taking part—including Giambruno, who is making her fourth attempt to complete an entire book in one month. Her previous tries resulted in one novel, Life In Between, and two narratives that fizzled out. Meeting the goal requires cranking out 1,667 words a day – about six pages, double spaced. Is she nuts? Her friends on campus think so. “They say, ‘Are you kidding me? Every day you sit down and do that?’” Well, yes. “I’ve always called myself a writer,” she says. “It’s always been a way I identify myself.” She also identifies herself as a medic. She’s a volunteer EMT who serves with a fire department in her Bethel, Connecticut, hometown. At Keene State, she hopes to gain entrance into the nursing program.

As it happens, her passions for health care and writing sometimes overlap: She gets story ideas through her EMT work. “I meet people in the raw, having emotional experiences,” she says. “This could be the worst day of their life.” At the moment, Giambruno is behind in her NaNoWriMo word count, and she realizes she may not be able to wrap up the novel in one month. But she’s invested enough that she plans to continue working on it. She wants to know where her characters are headed. “They control me; it’s not the other way around,” she says. “I don’t have much say in the matter.”

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