National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which takes place every November, might seem like a crazy endeavor: write 50,000 words–a short rough draft of a novel–in 30 days. But it’s doable.
I just participated in my first-ever NaNoWriMo. Disclaimer, however: I have written novels before, so I had that experience under my belt to learn from. But I’d never attempted a draft in a month.
Why NaNoWriMo?
My logic was–why not? Especially in the weird world of 2020, when the only places I’d really been going were work and the grocery store, with the rest of my time spent at home being my introverted self.
This past year, I’ve also been making the most of the free time I now have after wrapping up a PhD, filling what used to be dissertation-writing/editing time with what I call “fun writing” time. And I had an idea that was a little different from my usual historical fiction, so I decided to run with it.
So in pursuing 1) a genre that was a little different, and 2) a lofty goal of a short first draft in 30 days, how did this make me a better writer?
Learning When to Write
Writing 50,000 words in 30 days works out to 1,666 per day. Confession: though I crossed the 50,000-word finish line by the end of the month, I did not hit that 1,666-word goal every day.
A lot of my fiction writing happens “when I feel like it” (which is often). But committing to this word count in a month forced me to look at when I’m at my best.
And I found that most weekdays, I was too tired to write much after work, especially if it wasn’t a work-from-home day. Maybe I’d get a few hundred words down. (A particularly rough day at work lent itself to one of two extremes: either getting a mere paragraph down, or writing pages and pages to de-stress.)
But on weekends, I could get on a roll. We’re talking thousands of words. And in the very early hours of weekday mornings before starting my work-from-home day, I found I had more energy than in the evenings.
But I made a point of writing (almost) every day. And I did stuff related to the story that didn’t involve writing. Both when I was and wasn’t writing, for example, I listened to music that was like a “soundtrack” for the story. (Part of what I wrote takes place in the ’90s, so yeah, that was fun.)
Learning Not To Strive for Perfection
As someone who has revised a couple of novels, plus a dissertation, this was a tough one for me. I have been guilty of revising as I write, which is a waste of time during NaNoWriMo.
I found I had to be okay with a scene being not-so-great. If I was trudging through it, knowing it was dry or mechanical or cliched, I just kept going. If a scene was shorter or less funny than how I’d initially imagined it, I accepted it and moved on to the next one. I adapted Dory’s mantra in Finding Nemo from “just keep swimming” to “just keep writing.”
There would be time after November to fix it.
Learning What Works…and What Doesn’t
So, with that “just keep writing” mentality, I found I noticed more when something wasn’t working. My thought process was, okay, I know that this doesn’t exactly work, but I have some ideas of how to fix it later.
How did I notice this when I was writing so quickly? Wouldn’t the pace of NaNoWriMo make it more difficult to catch the messy stuff?
Part of the answer to those questions is that I had the full story more or less mapped out it my head, but not exactly. So I knew the general trajectory and how it ended, but I left some of the details up to my imagination (and up to my characters) as I wrote. I am what writers call a “plantser”: someone who both plans out a novel (sort of), but who leaves plenty of room to fly by the seat of their pants. If something didn’t quite fit with the overall story arc, however, I noticed.
As to the other part of the answer, I should probably also mention that I wrote everything by hand. And counted every word. So I was–passively, at least–rereading everything I wrote as I went without doing a thing to revise it.
As far as mechanics, I could see:
- when dialogue sounded off
- when a paragraph was clunky
- where I repeated certain words
As far as the story and characters, I noticed:
- plot holes I’d have to go back and fix
- where another character needed to come back into the storyline after disappearing for a while
- when character motivations weren’t convincing
- when a scene needed way more emotion
All of this would be useful later on. But after November was over.
I was a better writer on December 1st than on November 1st. And that knowledge gave me a little confidence boost to keep on doing one of the things I love most: just keep writing.
