It’s that time of year when people get nostalgic for the good times in their lives, when they start collecting tips and recipes for the perfect pumpkin pie or stuffing or turkey, when the to-do lists start and the holiday boutiques and open houses and parties crowd the calendars like flies on honey.
It’s also the time when bad-ass writers hunker down to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Or wannabe bad-ass writers. Or anyone wanting to try something radical that shakes up their life and propels them toward being a creative person.
It’s November: National Novel Writing Month.
NaNoWriMo was founded by a San Francisco Bay area writer, Chris Baty, in 1999 because he and his friends “wanted to write novels for the same dumb reasons twentysomethings start bands.” After grabbing the shortest novel on his shelf (which happened to be Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) and doing a rough word count, the magic number was set: 50,000.
The rules are simple. You can’t start until 12:01 am on November 1 and must finish and upload your draft through the NaNoWriMo counter by midnight on November 30. If your manuscript exceeds 50,000 words, you receive a certificate of achievement. And, perhaps, an itch to do it again, or to revise the draft or start a blog or take a writing class.
In the 21 years since Nano began, nearly 400,000 novels have been completed and almost 800,000 active novelists have participated. The organization has created and sustained its Young Writers Program for writers under age 18 as well as K-12 educators.
Best-sellers that began as NaNoWriMo projects include Water for Elephants, WOOL, and Fangirl.
The experience is unique. In the years I participated and completed two first draft novels, I was working full-time with a 90-minute commute each direction and a pre-school aged daughter. The rhythm I found worked best for me was to write early in the mornings—3:30-5 am on workdays and 4:30-6:30 am on weekends.
The daily quota of 1,666 words doesn’t feel too bad on the first day. Or even on the second day. But by day 11, it can get challenging. Fall behind by a day or two and you’re staring a 5,000-word deficit in the face. The bonus of having NaNoWrimo in November is Thanksgiving weekend — four days of freedom, when if needed, you can barricade yourself into a locked room and pound out the words.
Doing NaNoWriMo taught me unforgettable lessons about writing:
- just get the words on paper
- don’t re-read your work
- a shitty first draft is a goal worth working toward
And that one can do anything with the right motivation and focus. It was exhilarating and exhausting.
I haven’t undertaken NaNoWriMo in a few years now. But that tingle that runs up my spine every November never goes away. And in my own way, this year, I’m participating by putting the finishing touches on the second NaNoWriMo novel I wrote all those years ago.
As Theodore Roosevelt said so famously 110 years ago:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
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