It's been nine years since my very first NaNo, and I'm not ashamed to say I've never won, not even once. If you look at my total word count on the NaNoWriMo site you’ll see in all that time, across ten different attempted projects from traditional WriMos and the Camps, I've only made it to 98,335 words. That's shorter than the near-finished draft of my current novel. That's less words than Twilight. In just 2019, I wrote 131,812 words of fanfiction alone. How can I even dare to (metaphorically) show my face on this blog with such a pathetic number behind my words?
Well, in short, NaNoWriMo is not an accurate measure of success.
Thousands of authors smash right through their 50,000 word goal each year, but despite the Novel in NaNoWriMo, next to no one ever actually finishes a book in thirty days. There’s so much more to the process, far more than we can ever cram into a single month, and no amount of autumnal magic is going to make November an exception. Oftentimes, it’s one of the busiest months of the year.
No Write November
Back in Fall of 2013, my senior year of high school, my class and I were given an assignment. In order to graduate, we had to complete a career oriented project. We were required to spend at least ten hours outside of school participating in some activity that related to our goals for a future career, then turn in a detailed portfolio including a log of time spent ‘on the job,’ details of the work we did, and notes from an adult mentor in the field who helped and monitored us. One of my classmates shadowed a dentist. Another helped out in a mechanic shop. I, stubborn, awkward, and ornery as I was, decided to write a book.
So, naturally, when October hit, I dove headfirst into prepping and setting up my NaNoWriMo page. I'd been writing for some time now, but I'd never finished a project. I didn't know the first thing about publishing. My only points of reference were fanfiction, wherein a finished story can be anywhere from 500 words to 350k, and that big, round number at the end of the NaNoWriMo meter: 50,000 words. It seemed somehow both huge and easily obtainable. 1,667 words a day? No sweat! I read more words than that on a nightly basis. But to finish an entire novel, for the first time in my life? I’d finally be able to call myself a ‘real’ author. I was anxious to get started, eager to finally prove myself, and oh so confident that this time I’d finally get there. 2013 would be my year.
And then I lost. In November 2013, I wrote just 1,655 words. Not even a full day’s quota. The extensive records I kept for the project tell me all those words were hammered out on November 9th that year, between 12:06pm and 3:30pm. After that, I didn’t write again until December 23rd.
I don’t know what happened. I’d already written much more in other months; in July that year I wrote 23,163 words, nearly half a novel as far as I understood. But something must have happened in November, between Thanksgiving holidays and senior year work. If ye olde posting dates are to be believed, I managed to write 1,806 words of fanfiction in November 2013 — more than my actual novel. Maybe I hit writer’s block. Or maybe I hit the midpoint mud; that mucky feeling that comes with reaching the middle of a novel and suddenly losing steam. John Green has an entire NaNo pep talk about it, published a good four years after my senior year failure. Too late to help me.
Regardless of why, the fact remains that I crashed and burned, big time. I’d never failed NaNoWriMo so hard before in my life, nor have I since.
But that catastrophic failure wasn’t the end of my book or my writing career. In fact, I went on to ace the project and outshine every other student in my class (judging by the horrified awe on their faces when I said I spent a grand total of 136 hours on this ten hour assignment. If I wasn’t the weird kid before, I certainly was now.)
So, if NaNo wasn’t a good measure of my success, then what was I missing when I wanted to cry come December 1st? What is the key to finishing a novel?
Three things: perseverance, practice, and peer reviews.
Perseverance
The fastest way to failure is, of course, to give up. On one hand, I had no choice, since my graduation hinged on completing my book. But more than that, despite months long hiatuses and an epic dumpster fire of a NaNoWriMo, I kept going back to the word processor and putting words down on the page.
After November 9th, I didn’t pick up my novel again until Christmas Break. But even in just five days, I managed to slap down another 13,000 words. I finished out the year with just about 12k to go before my ultimate goal of 50k, simply because I didn’t give up.
I took a break, certainly. Everyone needs time to refuel their creative resources, and that isn’t a luxury the rapid dash of NaNoWriMo gives us. But once I’d had my time to relax, focus on school and holidays and, I think, get over a messy breakup, I was renewed and refocused. I jumped back into the fray and kept going.
Practice
When I started my senior project, I obviously already knew I wanted to be a writer. I’d been looking at universities with creative writing programs (more on that in another blog), and I was so often scribbling down drabbles in a writing journal I carried everywhere that my English teacher lent me her copy of Stephen King’s On Writing almost by force. I learned a lot from that book that I still use and think about today. But even more crucial than studying the craft is something I’d already been doing for over four years: practicing it.
I often reference fanfiction on this site. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve written it, or that I still write it today. It is one of the greatest resources we have for practicing writing. Fanfiction offers us a prepackaged setting and cast to work with, allowing us to focus in on one element at a time. You can bypass the heavy duty work of world building and character creation to cut into the meat of structuring a plot, or you can do the opposite, and explore more ways to expand on and develop a character without having to worry about crafting a cohesive story in the background.
By the time I started writing my novel, I had around 50,000 words of fanfiction already under my belt — essentially an entire novel already done and learned from. I’d made mistakes and learned from them, reviewed my own writing time and again, and picked out where my flaws were and what kinds of scenes I enjoyed writing. Add that to the 37,000 words I’d already sunk into NaNoWriMo with other original projects before my project even began, and you can imagine the huge difference it made in my work. I knew, if vaguely, what I was doing, and I was used to doing it. Those are two essential elements to any successful venture, writing or otherwise.
Peer Review
The most important thing in determining my success, however, was my mentor. My mom was the one who found our local writer’s group in December that year. I should thank her every day for that, because those little one hour sessions spent huddled around my manuscript in a bookstore cafe with author Charley Pearson truly changed my life. He taught me about critique groups and the importance of exchanging drafts to get other authorly eyes on your writing, indispensable aspects of the writing world that help us improve and grow.
Imagine being seventeen, socially anxious, and eager to prove to a small town that your words will not only keep you fed but one day make you famous. Across from you sits a veteran author, in both senses of the phrase, with a hint of heterochromia and a welcoming smile that says ‘You belong at this table.’ Living proof of your dream, extending a hand to help you climb the first steps into his world.
“I was pleasantly impressed,” he said upon reading those first 24,000 words. (Not verbatim, because this was eight years ago and I have the memory of a goldfish.) “I can see you have good writing skills already.”
Validation! All those years of practice, all my perseverance and determination to see this project through, it was all paying off. It was like the NaNoWriMo fiasco a month previous had no impact on my ability to write. Almost as though it didn’t even matter.
(Spoiler alert: It didn’t.)
What did matter was the work. Our sessions were essentially a simplified version of the creative writing classes I would go on to take in college. In the beginning, while I was working to build up another long section of words for him to critique after the initial word dump, he assigned me a reading, or brought in a segment of his own work for me to workshop, which was an amazing honor in itself. It was an exercise mostly, as he’d already run the chapter by his real critique group; a sample for me to practice on. But I still remember pointing out a choreography issue in the draft chapter he offered me, and the quiet surprise in his voice when he said something to the effect of, “I hadn’t thought of that, you’re right.” I was insanely proud of myself. I felt like I wasn’t just a kid he got saddled with, but a fellow author. In fact, I was.
Mr. Pearson critiqued my writing as well. He spotted the (many) flaws in my story structure and poked at plot holes. Then I worked to fix them. The longer we worked together, the tighter my story got. The twists and turns in my head changed direction after each meeting, and my story was made all the better for it. But best of all? Having someone else’s ideas bouncing around the room sparked the inspiration I needed to push through that midpoint muck and get my story rolling again. Those precious peer reviews were the perfect tool to pierce my writer’s block and push me to finish my book.
So yeah, I lost NaNoWriMo. But what seemed like a failure, a loss of more than 48,000 words, was really a gain of 1,655 toward my final project. That very failure was really just a stepping stone, one of many leading to the greatest achievement any writer can hope for. A finished novel.
The Folly of WriMo
Dear writer, please don’t misunderstand. I love NaNoWriMo. That is, I love the idea of it. Anything that inspires us to keep writing, encourages us to open up our word docs and create with passion and fervor, is something to be celebrated. Where we run into trouble is not the sign up form, but the quota graph, demanding of us a machine-like consistency and resilience to the unpredictability of life. I can write 1,667 words a day. I do write that many, and most days I write more. Workdays, that is. Because I’m human. I need breaks. I’m wearing a wrist brace as I type this, just to prove my point. Some people are fast writers, others are slow as molasses, but it isn’t the speed or the numbers that make you an author. It’s the work you put in.
In our second or third meeting, Mr. Pearson dropped a bomb on me. Each meeting, after our business was finished, we took a moment to chat, and that day he asked my mother and I if we’d heard of NaNoWriMo. I’d already sunk more than 30,000 words into past events at this point, but social anxiety is a beast, so I held my tongue and let my mom say no, she hadn’t. The entire time he explained the concept, my heart hammered in my chest, because this was something I knew, and if a ‘real’ author used it too, it had to be legit!
Then he said there was a quote he liked. I don’t remember if it was from a friend of his or a writer he followed. Goldfish brain and all that. What I do remember are the words.
“Only an American would think they could write an entire book in a month.”
I was shocked. The implication here was obvious. It was foolish, even obnoxious, to really think you could win NaNoWriMo. But how could that be, when authors I loved, like John Green (huge at the time), were so passionate about it? How could NaNoWriMo be a myth?
Today, I understand the sentiment a little better. Even if you reach 50k, or 100k, or even 150k like some maniacs do, what you have at the end is not a novel. It’s a draft. No writer in the world can write an entire book in one go. Revision is all part of the process. A month from now, or two months, or a year, you’re going to look back at all the words you slapped onto the page in your manic race to the 50k finish line, and you’re going to see mistakes, or plot holes, or weird, feverish scenes you definitely wrote at 3am the night before Thanksgiving. You’re going to have perfect scenes and a whole slew of disasters that need to be revised almost word for word. That’s okay. That’s good. Because it means you have a story. Even if it’s only 25k, or even just a measly 1,655 words, you sat down and opened your heart to let your story come out into the world.
Writing is about more than the numbers. It’s about the ideas we cook up, the passion we bring to the table, and the skills we hone over years of practice, constantly working to become a better version of ourselves. Everything I learned in those bi-monthly meetings with Charley Pearson are still in use in my craft today. I rarely even touch NaNoWriMo these days, either because the schedule doesn’t work out, I’m swamped with family events, or I just can’t handle the stress of racing against the clock. But I remember the importance of an outline, and the crucial role a critique group plays. I remember the satisfaction of emailing my final chapters to him, and writing down the final word count: 65,211. I’d have won NaNo if I crammed all that writing into a single month. But I’d have lost the experience of our drawn out sessions. I’d have lost the chance to feel like I had an equal place at the table with a real author.
I still think about the briefest, tiniest impact I might have had on that draft of his, now published as Ripple in the Sea. I wonder if he still thinks about my untitled senior novel, and the immeasurable impact he had on my career.
Winning NaNoWriMo isn’t what got me where I am today. Letting myself lose without giving up is what led to my greatest breakthroughs.
What has your experience been with NaNoWriMo? Are you going for it again this year, or even testing it out for the first time? Or do you ignore the whole thing and keep to your own pace? Let’s chat about it below!
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