About OHHOW
One Hundred Hours of Writing (OHHOW) is an interactive writing event, in which we link streamers together to create a non-stop, around-the-clock, around-the-world writing adventure. It is run entirely by volunteers and for free.
OHHOW started as a way to bring writers together virtually during a time when we were isolated. It has grown into a community of streamers who share their love of writing in Weekends of Writing Wildly and One Hundred Hours of Writing events.
During November, in conjunction with the annual NaNoWriMo challenge, OHHOW runs for a full 100 hours (which is where we got the name from!). During April and July, OHHOW runs shorter events (Weekends of Writing Wildly), usually 40 hours long.
How It Started
In 2020, NaNoWriMo went fully virtual in response to the pandemic. This prompted MLs (Municipal Liaisons; regional organisers and facilitators of fun) around the world to band together to provide new and exciting ways to connect with each other online.
One of those ways is through live streaming on Twitch. An ML in North Carolina had the amazing idea to stream 100 consecutive hours of writing on Twitch during NaNoWriMo 2020. But they couldn’t do it alone. So they sent out a call and replies came from all over.
In that first OHHOW event, we assembled a team of over 20 different MLs and Wrimos to take turns streaming. Since then, we have added Weekends of Writing Wildly during the April and July Camp NaNos, and plan to continue to keep the fun streaming for writers everywhere.
How It Works
Each event is divided into two-hour time slots, and volunteers select the times that suit their schedule. For the November OHHOW event, that’s 50 time slots, running in a single chain!
OHHOW uses Twitch as our streaming platform for events. The first streamer starts us off, and fills their two-hour time slot with chatting about writing and some writing sprints. Everyone watching can take part and put their word counts in to be counted, and our moderators tally up the word counts for the streamer and the event as a whole.
When the two-hour time slot is up, the streamer hands off to the next streamer on the schedule. Using Twitch’s handy raiding functionality, all the stream viewers are moved seamlessly on to the next stream in the chain, and the fun continues!
At the end of the event, we tally up the total words written during the event and let everyone know how awesome they all did!