National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) takes place each November. The idea is for participants to write a fifty-thousand-word novel by the end of the month, posting their totals every day and perhaps taking part in events such as online writing “sprints” in which they write nonstop for short periods.
I’d never taken part in NaNoWriMo myself. I didn’t entirely understand the concept behind it, and the goal of writing quickly didn’t really appeal to me. I wrote at my own pace, and it seemed adequate. But during the last year I began to feel unhappy with the amount of writing I’d been able to produce. And I wasn’t that delighted with the things I’d been writing. I felt like I was in danger of drifting into the eternal revision loop. So I signed up for NaNoWriMo to force myself to get moving.
And it worked. In fact, it more than worked: it set me in a new direction altogether. Before NaNoWriMo my minimum word count was a thousand per day. That’s not bad or unusual. A lot of working writers do a thousand a day, and some do less. But I felt stuck at a thousand, and I also felt I wasn’t accomplishing as much as I wanted. During NaNoWriMo, I pushed my daily total to two to three thousand. One amazing day I even managed to do four. And every day I’d post my total on my NaNoWriMo page and check what my friends had been able to do (you can link to friends who are also doing the challenge), and it felt really, really good. Since NaNoWriMo I’ve been able to keep that two-thousand-word average, and I know now that I could do more if I needed to. It’s surprisingly empowering knowledge. I came out of NaNoWriMo feeling re-energized and optimistic. And I had a new Konigsburg novella to show for it.
Every year there are a series of blog posts from professional writers criticizing NaNoWriMo. They make several points, but those boil down to a couple of major ones. First, writing fifty thousand words doesn’t mean you’re a writer, it just means you wrote fifty thousand words in a month. Which leads to the second point: there’s no guarantee that those fifty thousand words aren’t total crap. This is undoubtedly true. Doing NaNoWriMo doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be a writer when you finish. Becoming a writer takes long hours of critiques and revision and learning your craft. But I’d argue that being able to produce a finished work is the necessary first step in this process. How many people say they want to write a book and never do? While it’s true that some of those people probably shouldn’t be writing books in the first place, even those who should haven’t been able to. And NaNoWriMo shows them that they can, if they’re willing to put in the time.
So I’ll probably do NaNoWriMo again next year just for the fun of it. And from now on I’ll be properly supportive of other people who sign up, whether they finish or not. After all, challenging yourself is always a good idea. Right?