I Wrote a Novel (Except I Didn’t):

My experience completing NaNoWriMo and what I learned from it.

Let me just start off by saying that this blog has been a long time coming. I meant to be publishing things on here quite a bit earlier than now (around five months earlier to be exact (yeesh) but I have a valid excuse! There was one small, voluntarily speed bump (among many) called NaNoWriMo.  

This was my first year “competing” in NaNo, if one can call it competing, and yet I won… somehow. 

But before I get into my time and experience and what “winning” even means, I should outline what NaNoWriMo is for those who don’t know about it (which is a surprising amount of people if you’re not actively within a writing circle).

So, if you ever get asked “what’s that writing thing you’re doing?” by a family member or “why are you spending so much time in front of that laptop of yours?” during the month of November then this should give you an answer!

What is this NaNoWriMo you speak of?

NaNoWriMo, as it is quolloquially known as, stands for National Novel Writing Month, and is hosted by some amazing people in the Bay Area. What it entails is writing 50 thousand words in one month, or the length of about one “Great Gatsby.” It is meant as a motivator, a way for writers to get off their sorry butts and get to writing.

It’s also really hard.

The goal is to average 1,667 words every day for 30 days straight, which is around six to seven pages a day.… That, for any writer, fiction or non-fiction, no matter what medium, is a lot of writing.

And before NaNo, I struggled to write that much on a good day. One thousand words (or around four pages) was my happy spot, and I was content in that world. I would write and edit and write some more. It was a back and forth with editing and writing and I had a rhythm.

That rhythm of writing and editing was dominated mostly by my inner critic, the voice that says that the work is not good enough or is not strong enough. I could never publish that.

But…

If “writing is rewriting”, then I didn’t do much writing

And that’s a good thing! Great actually. The deadline and intensity of NaNo forced me to just buckle down and get the pages out, not to spend half an hour tinkering with what I wrote the day before. 

There is a time and place for revision, and that is after everything is done. That’s a bold statement, I know, and one that, as I write, it makes me an active raging hypocrite… but it’s true. 

NaNo forces you to sit down and crank out words and it’s genuinely surprising how much you can get down in even just an hour. I surprised by self sometimes by getting around 2k words in the span of just an hour. 

I found, as well, that as it went on, my writing speed got faster. Stuff that would have taken me two to three hours to write before was on the page in just one hour. Now, is any of that writing good? I have no idea! Probably not! And I have not tried to go back and read much of it yet.

But it’s there. And because it’s there, that means that I have something to make better than it is now. And I couldn’t do that if I had nothing.

So when I choose to go back and read what I wrote, it will be there, waiting for me with open arms.

Consistency is key

Just like almost any other creative endeavor, consistency is the real winner here. That is the way that you will make it through in flying colors and that is why on the NaNo website they have a way to track your writing “streak” and how many words a day you’ve written on average.

These stats and graphs for me were key to keeping the motivation going. Four hundred words can seem like a lot, especially when you’ve just written 1,200 already, but seeing that you’re so close to how much you wrote the day before really gives you (or at least it gave me) the kick in the pants to keep going for the day and just brute force out the words.

Writing Sucks

As I’ve written about before already, NaNoWriMo is hard. Really hard. And it’s made all the harder by the act of writing itself. It is a self-investigative process where you really need to dig deep personally to create these little darlings of pages only to raze them to the ground soon after like they meant nothing to you.

It hurts a lot of the time. But man is it so worth it.

It is awesome to look back and see now that I have over 300 pages of a writing project that I am still not done with (but I’m so close!). That is over 200 pages longer than anything I’ve ever written before! EVER!

It is immensely rewarding and that is something that I can only convey so well on paper (well screen, but you get the point). To write something that fast gives you no time really to think about the immensity of it all; it truly is an amazing process, especially for someone who had not done it before.

And for that I say thank you to NaNoWriMo.

Writing is great

and it took NaNo for me to really appreciate what I have been writing in the last little while. It’s a process of ups and downs but when you realize that you can write during a day when you’re leaving a wedding and flying from L.A to San Francisco and you have work tomorrow and there are all these moving parts around and you still manage to get over the 1,667 goal, it is a great feeling.

So thank you to NaNoWriMo. And maybe, next November, pick it up and see how far you get. As long as you write anything at all, you’re a winner. That’s all that matters.

It’s fun. It’s rewarding. And it sucks.

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One more note

Here’s to the official launch of this blog! I have no idea how much I will be writing on here, and the content will vary widely, but it will be here. So here’s to the veritable christening of this blog.

Now all I’ve got to do is find a bottle of champagne to smash against the side of my computer and then we’ll be all set.