My First NaNoWriMo
It’s about that time of the year again, and no, I’m not talking about spooky season—it’s almost NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. Each November, thousands of writers band together as a community to create new writing projects or improve on works-in-progress. NaNo traditionalists aim to write 50,000 new words in the span of a month, while rebels do whatever the hell they want. It’s a lot of work in not a lot of time, but it’s always fun, and I’m looking forward to participating this year.
I’ve done NaNo twice before, and each time I’ve been lucky enough to reach the goals that I set out for myself. They’ve resulted in two finished books that I’m quite proud of, and one of them is The Sleepless. Yes, that book is indeed a NaNo book, but not only that—it was my very first NaNo book. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right, dear reader. It is flashback time.
The year was 2017. It was a Sunday night. I was on the way home after spending the weekend at my folks’ place and I had a long journey ahead of me. Three trains to cross two rivers. I was bone tired and had a long way to go, and as I do on Sunday nights, I think about the week ahead. I knew the work week was going to be insane, and I had a ton of social commitments too. I started to think, how awesome would it be if I didn’t require sleep? From that one question, a series of other, bigger questions followed that formed the seed from which The Sleepless was eventually gonna grow.
I realized that it was only a few days before NaNo, and so I thought, hey, why not? Let’s give this the old college try. With little to no preparation, I committed to writing 50k of this idea, just to see if something’s there. (Also, I wanted to see if I could rise to the challenge. I love me a good target goal.) I didn’t have an outline, no plan, no schedule. I would just wing it. If I finish, then great! If not, well, the odds were stacked against me anyway, and hey, maybe the story didn’t have legs after all. There were literally zero stakes, and that felt very freeing.
So I set out to do it. During the day I’d think about what I’d write when I got home from work, and each night I’d plop myself in front of the laptop to type up 1,667 words. I mostly failed to meet the daily quota, but I made up for it on weekends. This project took up all of my spare time and brain space, and I did it for 30 days. It was harrowing. What was I thinking?
I wasn’t. And what I really like about NaNo is precisely that: I wasn’t thinking. Or at least not overthinking. Prior to that NaNo year, I didn’t know the difference between a pantser and a plotter. I know now that I’m more a plotter, but with Nano, my overly analytical and editorial tendencies did not have the opportunity to stop me from putting words down on paper. I needed to meet that word count, dammit.
And it worked. By the end of the month, I had 50k words. Words that I never had before. A full story, something I’d never achieved before. It was a lot of long nights, pots of coffee, and foregone parties. Lots of missed opportunities for rest and relaxation and quality time with my loved ones. What kept me going was seeing my word count rise, and getting that endorphin hit when I see that I’m on track to finish. I suppose at the time I also believed that the story’s good, at least good enough that I wanted to see it through to the end.
I had two big takeaways from that NaNo year. One was that I liked writing. Really liked it. Enough to do it despite the time and effort it required, and despite having zero expectation that the story would be done, or that anyone would ever read it, or that the story was even objectively good. The act of creating new worlds and characters and situations was so energizing that even when my body was so tired, and my brain could hardly function, my soul felt alive. (Barf, I know. I’m sorry--that’s really what it felt like.)
The second big takeaway was “wow, I can do this.” And if I can do this, what else can I do? What is next? See, this is where the plotter side of me came out. Finishing NaNo gave me a sense of accomplishment that fueled me for whatever goal I set my sights on next. It would take two full years before I’d start sending my manuscript out to industry pros, and as long as that lull was, that journey started because NaNo gave me the opportunity to write, and finishing gave me the confidence to follow through.
I did a lot of things after 11/30/2017. I committed to taking writing seriously, took writing classes, wrote a couple more books (one of them during NaNo 2020). I found my writing communities and I started putting myself out there. I entered PitchWars, then got an agent, and then got a book deal. Soon, The Sleepless, my first NaNo project, is going to be a published book. And it all started from that tiring Sunday night, from that germ of an idea, and from a decision to try something new and challenging. I wish I could say that the trajectory was as straightforward as it sounds, but it is not. Far from it. What’s clear though is that if I didn’t do NaNo, I probably wouldn’t have done any of the other things at all.
Image credits: NaNoWriMo logo, chart, winner badge, and project screengrab all via nanowrimo.org