The first time I did NaNoWriMo, it was 2005 and I managed to rope in my ride-or-die buddy from the copy desk. In case you’ve never heard of it, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and the goal is to write 50,000 during the month of November. To do that, you need to write about 1,600 words a day. The point is to be consistent, which I could use some help with, in all honesty. Now, if you don’t care about what those words are, it’s very easy to do this. In theory, if you have a great idea, it’s also supposed to be easy. And I had an idea, and so did Lisa. The problem is that we both had full-time jobs and families. As I recall, we both found ourselves short by some 30,000 words going into the final week of the month.
Our first NaNoWriMo ended with a last-day dash to hit 50,000 words, and we did it, and it was fun. We went from restaurant to restaurant (getting kicked out of an Eat ‘n Park for stealing their electricity!) for fresh motivation, and ended the night at Lisa’s house, where we made it by midnight and we celebrated into the early hours of the morning. It was fun. Of course, my novel had become a nonsensical mass of words. I botched it so badly that I’ve been too embarrassed to look at it. It was one of my favorite story ideas, too. But, whoohoo, 50,000 by any means necessary, right? Right.
I guess.
Each November since, I’ve thought about it, at least a little, but would decide against it. But last November, I decided to try again. I had another idea and, with my plans to get out of journalism in high gear, I was feeling good, creative. I was tearing it up, too. Until Election Day. Sorry for my liberal tears, but it shook me. I don’t suffer from depression, but I had really never felt so low. I felt like I was tricked into believing that, while imperfect, this world was finally turning in a direction that made me feel like I could have children here and that their lives would be better than mine, and in the space of just a few hours, that was gone. Which is another issue entirely. But let’s say that sitting down to write the morning after, the week after, the month after? I could barely get up, let alone stir my creativity. So, yeah, NaNoWriMo sucked it hard last year.
So this year, the NaNoWriMo emails starting rolling in in late October. Right around that time, I decided that in pursuing freelance writing opportunities, I should maybe revisit my roots — creative fiction. Which, of course, had me high on the promise of hitting 50,000 words this year. For real this time. It didn’t start great, I have to say. I wrote zero words on Nov. 1. I believe I only made the decision to do it on that day. But the next day, I was in business, and my story took off.
But then life, as usual, happened and I fell behind. I started to feel like a big fat failure again, until two things happened. First, my story had taken on a life of its own. I had some plot points written out that I wanted to hit, but getting from A to B was the really fun part. I thought I knew how my main character, Samuel (yeah, on day two, I decided I don’t like that name after all. EDIT!), would get there, but then he and the rest of the cast took the wheel and it was a lot of fun. I normally love writing dialogue and hate writing surround-sound. That didn’t change last month, but I learned I could do it. In short bursts.
The second thing that happened stemmed from a new thing I’m trying. It’s called a bullet journal. You write down your goals and ideas and all the miscellaneous in one place. One optional part of this journal is a habit tracker, where you make a chart of things you want to accomplish and color in the days that you actually do it. Towards the end of the month, I began to realize it would take another epic crash-and-burn night fueled by Eat ‘n Park adrenaline to make my word goal. That didn’t make me feel great, but then I filled in my tracker over the final weekend, using the NaNoWriMo word tracker and I realized that I had been writing nearly every day of November. And my story was going great. And I was at about half the word count.
So on Nov. 30, I wrapped up NaNoWriMo just as Samuel and his new (girl?)friend Caroline closed in on his parents who were “on the lam.” Their words. My word count? 25,065.
And I like every single one of them.
I also didn’t get have to get kicked out of a restaurant, so that was nice, too.