Berkley High School Students Write a Novel in 30 Days

BHS students in Honors English 11 recently completed a remarkable challenge: writing a full-length novel, more than 50,000 words, entirely from scratch in 30 days.

The project, inspired by the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge, was a whole-class collaboration where students worked together to build every element of a novel: genre, characters, plot, scenes and dialogue. Before putting pen to paper, students spent weeks "reading as writers," studying how canonical authors make decisions about structure, language and storytelling. Then they brought those same skills to their own work.

 

Teacher John Duffy shared, “The result is something extraordinary: a complete, book-length manuscript that students conceived, drafted and finished together. The project reflects a growing body of research on what it looks like for students to engage in real disciplinary work, at scale, and with real stakes. Our students are immensely proud of what they produced, and they absolutely should be!”