Well, according to the official NaNoWriMo website, I have been a member since 2004, which… whew. I had a lot of years of false starts before I “won” NaNo for the first time (that’s just reaching the 50k word mark on a brand new manuscript in 30 days — no real competition involved), but since 2010 I’ve won six times, and I’ve published two of the novels I wrote primarily during a November past.
My keenest insight from NaNo is this: forcing yourself to build a habit is, often, the only way to do it. Now that I’ve pieced together the set of methods I currently use, I don’t really need to try and get through a whole manuscript in 30 days anymore. The point of using NaNo as a challenge is to kickstart a six-day-a-week habit that generally continues through the winter and into the spring, so long as I’m still cranking out the draft.
I used to love the co-agony of NaNo, of laboring side by side with your fellow authors to power through that seemingly-impossible word count until there, you crossed the finish line, triumphant or at least holding a partially-written manuscript. These days… I dunno! I think that there are all sorts of parts of the writing process that can be collaborative, and maybe should be — but drafting is when I need to be enveloped in my own story. Unless I’m actually riffing off someone else and we’re co-drafting the same story, with clear roles and responsibilities for who’s doing what, I don’t really need anyone else to be suffering or complaining.
Because I’m in a place where writing isn’t something I suffer through or want to complain about. I’d rather metaphorically wake up really early and go running when no one’s around than try and find a workout buddy.
Anyways, that’s just my spiel on why I still do NaNo even though I can pretty much write six days a week during the dark months.
This year, November’s been a solid month of drafting. I generated just over 50k words, with about 23k of those being for what I would call “the final pass” of the first draft. I’m about 1/5th through the number of chapters I’ve planned, which feels correct for the story’s pacing.
This novel is really coming together, which feels great because I wasn’t sure if my last eighteen-month timeline from concept development to book in readers’ hands was replicable. Who knows, life throws a lot my way, and so does a farm, but that’s a pretty decent timeline to aim for, and it seems to be happening again. Knock on barn wood.
Writing a novel has come to feel like a trust fall into my own arms. There’s this giddy sensation that I might not, in fact, land where I expect (and sometimes, I guess I don’t); and there’s a real confidence that maybe I do know what I’m doing, at least as much as anyone ever does when it comes to crafting compelling fiction. When you feel it, you feel it, and you latch onto it with the excitement of discovery, following the thread until you realize you’ve woven it pretty deftly into a tapestry that looks like a theme, depicting some characters and their arcs, through some details that are emblematic of where they came from and where they go. It’s an emotional through-line that works at every altitude.
I spent the last two years specifically studying and analyzing the craft of fiction, using some texts I’ll recommend some other time and the assistance of some other scholars of the field. What struck me throughout the intensive learning period was how much of what I had previously absorbed — by instinct as a voracious reader, by consuming endless writing texts as a kid, and by practicing pretty consistently throughout my life — was reinforced in the more explicit methods and processes I experimented with in the last 24 months. Yes, I gained some specific steps, but… for the most part, I’m honing a blade I forged long ago.
Just keep going. That’s NaNoWriMo’s ultimate message. Just keep going, and try new and difficult things, and you will get better.
