NaNoWriMo 2019: What It Taught Me About Being A Writer
NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, a concept invented in 1999 and has since grown into a not-for-profit charitable organisation which helps communities in the USA with writing fluency and education. They host several events a year, the largest and most well-known of which is NaNoWriMo itself, in which participants are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel across the span of November. Hundreds of thousands of people take part across the world, and many fledgling Wrimos have gone on to publish the very novels that this project helped them to start. I have wanted to do NaNoWriMo for many years now, and this year I actually plucked up the courage to get started. I learned many, many things about myself along this road, let me tell you.
Now, I have to admit at this point that this article began as a declaration of everything I thought was wrong with NaNoWriMo and why I would under no circumstances ever do it again, but a while into that I realised that a) it was just a page and a half of me complaining, and b) I am in no position whatsoever to criticise NaNo and the people who organise it. I’m no professional writer. I barely even consider myself a NaNo participant. Many members of the writing community get a lot out of doing NaNo every year, as indeed did I, and so I’ve decided that instead of going on about what I didn’t like, I shall instead reflect on what I enjoyed, and what I’ve learned to take forward into the future. I don’t intend this to be anything so formal as ‘advice’, but if anyone does find this useful, or indeed completely disagrees with me, let me know – I’d love to hear your thoughts.
The main lesson I’ve learned is the value of just putting words on paper. Don’t religiously follow your plot plan, don’t worry about whether those two sentences work well next to each other or if you’ve used the same word three times in a paragraph, just grab an idea and run with it. This is what most writers struggle with – turning off that Inner Editor and just getting ideas out there. I wrote most of my 50,000 words this way, and while I think less than half of them deserve to make it into the final draft, I’ve had those thoughts now, they’re on paper, and I will be able to expand them later. I might decide that actually some of them were a bit shit, but that is still progress; I can consider why they’re a bit shit, and I can change them accordingly.
I’m a bit astonished that none of this has occurred to me before, but I think that’s because up to now, I’ve been writing shorter and more episodic stuff, and I’ve rarely been under this much time pressure. I always wait for the idea for a scene to come to me, play it in my head over and over again on the bus to work and back, get the dialogue and major events exactly right, and then put it on paper. This makes my individual scenes good, but the overall narrative never really gets a look in. Forcing myself to sit down and write so much in one go made me consider the more long-term things, like actually, no, I don’t like that aspect of the main character so I need to re-write this entire section, or such-and-such-a-thing shouldn’t happen halfway through because it means I can’t do X-Y-Z later on. It’s made me look at the big picture in a way that I never have before, and completely shifted my perspective on what I need to think about when I’m writing this first novel.
I loved that about NaNoWriMo, and if the only point of it was to simply sit yourself down and write something every day, then I would be 100% on board.
But for me, the difficulty came along when the word count got thrown into the mix, because writing 50,000 words alongside a full time job and living your life is a lot more complicated than it sounds. The team behind NaNoWriMo actually advise that participants clear their social calendar for the month as much as possible, and I now understand why. According to very basic maths, in order to get 50,000 words in 30 days you need to write 1,667 words a day. I did not realise how difficult that is to do. For reference, this article you’re reading now is a hair under 1,500 words, and on a good day I could crack out a day’s 1,667 words in about an hour and a half when I got home from the office. But sometimes I would sit there for three hours and, for a variety of reasons, only manage about half that, which meant that the next day I then had to catch up, which took even more time and also sometimes didn’t happen, and… do you see where I’m going with this? Every time I didn’t manage to hit that daily word count, for no fault of my own, the pressure built, and I had to find more and more time writing each subsequent day.
And that’s if I sat there at the allotted time every day and simply couldn’t find the words. I, however, did not follow the NaNo team’s crucial advice, and I had an uncharacteristically busy November, to the detriment of my regular word count. But to be honest, I’m glad I didn’t. I feel like putting your life entirely to one side is a little bit impossible, and very mentally unhealthy. Even if the people in your life are the epitome of supportive and understanding, putting off human interaction for a whole month will have knock-on effects further down the line that aren’t necessary and can easily be avoided. No amount of words is worth sacrificing your sanity over.
Equally, if all you do is write for a whole month, you’re going to get sick of it, and by the end I found myself asking what the point even was. I felt like if I was going to become a stressed-out, anti-social gremlin for a month, those words I was writing had better be pretty damn good. Except they’re not. My goodness, they are not. In the immortal words of Hemmingway, “the first draft of anything is shit,” and my NaNo attempt is no exception. But that’s fine – the whole point of NaNoWriMo isn’t to create a masterpiece, it’s to put words on paper, to defeat the Fear of the Blank Page, and to develop a habit of writing.
I am personally of the opinion that the two targets completely work against each other. If the goal is to form a habit of writing, even just a little bit every day, then I would prefer to write fewer words that I had actually thought about than more words I’d raced through in order to hit an arbitrary word count.
But more importantly, I have utterly failed to develop that daily habit. When I finished, I was completely burned out. Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud of what I’ve achieved, but this article is the first thing I’ve written since November finished, and as I’m typing this it’s just ticked over into Christmas Eve. The comparison between November’s and December’s output is frankly embarrassing. Never mind the fact that I’m usually one of those annoying people who gets Christmas sorted out before December even starts, so that was an added stress that I didn’t need, but I fear I’m swerving dangerously back into the realms of complaining, so I shall stop there.
My point, if I have one at all, is that I don’t think I’m ever going to do anything as hardcore as writing a full 50,000 new words in one month ever again (and if I do, it will not be so close to Christmas), but I am going to make sure I commit myself to writing new words on a regular basis. It is my opinion that I will get a lot more useful results out of this, and appreciate my work more, than trying to do loads in a short burst. I’m going to say, here and now, as probably the only formal New Year’s Resolution I will come up with this year, that I will aim to do it twice a week. The other five days can be editing, re-imagining, or nothing at all, but from January onwards at least two days a week I shall spend creating new. There, I said it. It’s on the Internet now. I can’t take it back. Someone hit me up on social media every now and again to see how I’m doing.
And who knows – If I keep this up, one day I might actually write that novel.
Written by Jeni Meadows
Jeni works in the Alumni Relations department at Lancaster University, as the Prospect Researcher for the major gifts fundraising team. She is aware that it's a bit of a mouthful.
Her favourite things are Autumn, scented candles and, while she doesn't have one herself, large dogs. She prefers to write long form prose fiction.