Wilson Middle School eighth-graders are hoping that if their first novel doesn’t make them rich and famous, they’ll at least get a good grade.

Alison Rampa’s English classes have spent the month of November racking up the words for the National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo for short — Young Writer’s program while using lessons that align with the new Common Core Standards, which go into effect next school year.

“NaNoWriMo is an initiative to get people writing, and writing a lot, during the month of November,” said Rampa, who is working on a novel of her own while the students write. “Any writer can sign on and track their progress on the official website.”

For adults, the NaNoWriMo goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

“The Young Writers Program has a lower goal of 30,000 words, basically a novella, but allows for students to set their own goals,” Rampa said. “We do a much more modest challenge of 10,000 for an A and 5,000 words for a B.

“Many of my students, though, are determined to hit the 30,000 word goal even if it takes longer than one month,” she said.

Elizabeth Hoelle is writing about a young girl with an abusive father. Mattie Chambers’ novel “Fireflies,” a lesson about drinking and driving, begins with a girl waking up dead and helping her friend deal with the tragedy. Riley Nattermann’s untitled novel begins with a young man in the unfortunate position of having to finish off his mother-turned-zombie.

Not all of the novels are about vampires or zombies, but an informal survey suggests that there’s still a lot of death and disaster among the 75 novels her three classes are working on.

“At this age, a lot of terrible things happen in their imaginations,” Rampa said.

Rampa’s classes spent the month of October plotting their novels and laying out character and conflict, which align with the new Common Core Standards that go into effect next school year.

All of this writing is being done on Google docs, which allows the teacher to check in on any student at any time, even in real time.

“It facilitates a large amount of writing, whereas before I had to just trust that they were doing it,” Rampa said.

“The words and ideas are flowing and the level of intensity is impressive as all the students are super-enthused about the opportunity to write a novel,” Rampa said. “We usually have such a hard time getting kids to write outside of the classroom, but they’re doing it because I can watch the word counts grow.

“NaNoWriMo is designed to push them, to help them get rid of the ‘inner editor’ and just write,” she said. “It’s hard to not constantly be judging yourself, but the lesson here is no matter what you do, just sit down and start writing. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. The most important thing is to just get started.”