Today is the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). In honor of this writer’s working holiday, I’ll say a few words about my own experience with it.
I’m fad-averse by nature. I don’t know when I became this way. I like people. I like to do activities with others, but somewhere along the way, I became the kind of person who doesn’t do what’s popular simply because it’s popular. But I made an exception with NaNoWriMo (hereinafter, “nano” for the sake of brevity). Why? Because I was desperate.
By the summer of 2011, I had an unpublished novel in my drawer and a couple of false start drafts that weren’t going anywhere. I was back in grad school in my early 30s to learn how to write better (positive), but almost every story I had written up till then had been rejected by literary magazines and other outlets (negative). I needed a win, baby, and I needed one fast. Why?
Because I’m an excellent forecaster of my emotional future. I was almost a decade into my journey as an unpublished writer with little to show for it. With work and family obligations mounting, I knew I would probably give up soon on the writing if something good didn’t happen.
Isn’t there a point when you’ve tried to write without success for so long that you should lay down your pen? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to find out.
My friends did nano in November of 2010. I was busy doing my law job, and I was still not convinced that nano was for me. I liked to move to my own beat. So I skipped the event. Still, by May of 2011, having seen how much my friends got done during their time I decided to try.
I would start June 1, 2011. But I needed to figure out a few things. Write a novel or a set of linked short stories? Something new or based on a pre-existing story? Something normal or something wild? I decided to take a short story of mine called The Pie Man and expand it to novel length. Why?
It was the story of mine that others seemed to like the most. The story did well in my MFA workshop. It had placed second in the William Faulkner Words and Music short story contest. At least one agent at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans asked if I had any intention of making a book out of it. Barring no better options, I gave it a go.
This is not the story of how I wrote a novel in a month. Found an agent. Sold it to the largest publisher in the world with film rights and toured the known universe having my praises sung by angelic voices. No. No. No. This is a down to earth story. I needed to write 50,000 words in a month. I calculated that was about 1,700 words a day. No small feat. Distractions would arise. I would be tired some days. The real work would be finishing the task. Just like running a marathon.
But I did it. Little old scatterbrained, sometimes quite lazy me did it. I made my word count through work deadlines, family obligations, an already planned vacation. Once you have a goal and can visualize what success looks like, sticking to the goal becomes somewhat easier. Not easy, but easier.
I didn’t know if I would finish, but I figured at least I learn something about myself as a writer.
We construct a running narrative about our lives that often is not based in fact. I had been telling myself that I wasn’t a fast writer and that I never could be a fast writer. Some writers crank out a book in a few months (I’m looking at you genre writers). I’ve heard that Ian Fleming wrote at least one of the Bond books over two-week period when he was lounging at his beachfront bungalow. Those writers are rabbits and cheetahs. Me on the other hand? I had just taken five years to write one story. “The aforementioned The Pie Man.) I was a turtle, a snail, a sloth.
Nano taught me that I could write ludicrously fast if I did two things: (A) stopped editing while I wrote and (B) stopped overthinking things like character and plot. In other words, as long as I didn’t go back and fix misspellllings or spend h o u r s thinking about my protagonist’s motivation, I could really go. So went I did.
Now, I’ll be honest. The Pie Man book draft that I finished wasn’t very good. It was flat, formulaic. Whatever made the short story version great, did not survive translation to the novel. But that was another lesson I learned. It’s okay to have a couple hundred pages that are essentially for training purposes.
Instead of being bummed out, I started plotting my come back. I didn’t do NaNoWriMo in November 2011 because I wasn’t interested. I had learned what I needed to learn. But around May 2012 I tucked into a new manuscript that later became my first published book, We Cast a Shadow. Because of nano, I learned that it was all just rock and roll. Or perhaps, in my case, hip hop. As long as I had fun and kept moving forward, I might come away with something to show for it.
If you’re thinking about writing a book in a month, give it a shot. Maybe do it starting today, but feel free to be an iconoclast like your friend Maurice and do it whenever you damn well please.
Whatever you choose to do. Do it in a spirit of joy and love yourself in the process.
Thanks to everyone who subscribes to my little newsletter. I’m glad to know that you like it. And thank you to the premium subscribers who help make Sitting in Silence possible. If you didn’t know, there’s an app for Substack for both IOS and Androids. Check it out!
I read this through three times. Writing a novel is so intimidating but it is my most consistent aspiration, so I have nothing else to do but give it a try. I too get caught up in characterization and creating the perfect sentences. I really appreciate this post!
Happy nano! This one I’m revising a novel I wrote for nano in 2019. Lol. Good luck to everyone!