It felt so wrong. It felt so right.
I’ve never joined in with November National Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) as long as I’ve known about it despite some part of me always wanting to. Creating fiction has basically been the reason to get up in the morning for me ever since I was eleven, when a childhood illness left me pretty messed up and isolated for a while, during which time I devoured every fantasy and sci-fi book I could get my hands on. Honestly, I look back at that life event as something of a blessing—if, you know, we put aside the trauma of it all, which, really, why carry that with you?—for acting as a catalyst to turn me into a reader; a thing I most definitely was not beforehand.
I wonder, can all of us who love fiction and love reading pinpoint the transition? Do we all know which lazy summer or cooped up winter or chilly fall we converted to become lovers of the readerly life? (No one converts in the madness of spring, and I do not believe you if you say otherwise.)
But creating fiction can come in many different forms, and novel writing, blegh. Who wants to spend years writing something? Younger me needed more immediacy, needed to see his results this very hour, and didn’t want to do any work to get them. Poetry. That’s the thing! That’s the solution. A couple lines, hit the enter key in a few weird places to break it up (what the hell is enjambment?) and voila, art. NaNoWriMo, keep your novel writing, I’m going to be a poet. Yet, something was still lacking, something still missing (readers; any readers at all). For some reason—to my continuing bafflement, really—my overwrought poems failed to win me much of an audience (though I will never forget my older cousin’s encouragement! Thank you!) so I had to get more devious to capture others’ attention.
Role-playing games. Brilliant. Genius! I’ll create fiction, but I rope in an audience by tricking them into thinking they’re playing a game, and as a bonus they even do all the heavy lifting when it comes to the boring stuff like characterization and dialogue and personality. I just create an awesome world, throw some dice, sit back, and let the soothing waves of fictional content lap over me. Stuff it, NaNoWriMo, I’ll crank out fifty thousand words any month I want and who cares about things like story structure and sentence level prose and human emotion, I’ve got ten thousand words just about the complex commercial economy of this fictional island nation I created!
I still love poetry (clumsy, ungainly, emotional poetry) and I still love RPGs (the best way to keep a community together; seriously, try it) but I never quite managed to quiet that little voice that perks up in a bookstore or at the library and goes, ‘wow, books, huh? these sure are neat!’ and then goes ahead and conjures absurd images, like a book with my name on the cover, telling one of the stories that’s been rattling inside my head for so long.
Last year life pivoted for me (blessedly, mercifully) from a pretty intensely stressful situation (one lasting years) into something much more peaceful and, well, conducive to writing. So I thought, hey, let’s give this a shot. I have stories. I have so many stories. And hey, some of my friends (some) even think I’m a pretty okay storyteller! I can do this.
Cut to nearly a full year of not actually doing this.
I mean, actually writing a story? Oh my god. How do you even start? How do you create a character and give them a meaningful motivation? Where does the plot go? What the hell is story structure?!
Oh, hey NaNoWriMo. What was that? Don’t worry about any of that stuff? Just start writing and see what happens? Well… okay. Let’s try it your way.
Japery aside, I can’t overstate how happy I am that I stopped side-eying NaNoWriMo and finally just participated. I even finished the challenge! That said, I also can’t overstate how much I never ever want to participate EVER again. I’ve spent most of December thinking about, and then writing about, why that is—about what felt wrong, and about what felt right.
What follows is my NaNoWriMo post-mortem. It’s long. You can hop off the ride at anytime, of course, but I’ll throw down my summary right here in the next two sections in case you’re looking for the brief(ish) version.
IT FELT SO WRONG
In brief, then, I’m never doing NaNoWriMo again. Hard pass. I actually get a cringe feeling even thinking about it, and I’m not exaggerating that; my spine is tingle-flipping out the same way it does when waiting in the little examination room after the nurse who takes the vitals leaves but before the doctor walks in. Novel writing month just doesn’t work for me; I most certainly do not thrive while free writing, thirty days is way too many days in a row, and I am absolutely not able to develop story structure as I go.
Let the whining commence.
F-off Free Writing.
I deliberately set out to write with a very minimalistic outline and no real forethought about what the story was about or how it ought to be shaped. I felt that was in the spirit of the challenge and, well, I’ve spent most of the last year agonizing over minutiae and not actually writing so, chuck all that stuff in the bin and let’s just free write for thirty days.
I hate it. It doesn’t feel right. Look, I need to agonize over the point of a story. I need to know where I want the story to go before I set out, I need to picture the characters prior to the story’s start before I can launch them into the action; hell, I need to pause and visualize how my daily errands are going to go before I leave the house.
The problem, for me, is that I endlessly waffle between whether a thing should be like this or rather like that, or whether a story should veer off in X direction or instead go in Y direction. Visualizing things ahead of time is all well and good, but I need to eventually make decisions about all of the above and choose something so I can start—ahem—actually writing. But spontaneous free writing? No thanks. Writing already feels too much like public speaking and forgetting your speech; free writing just adds the extra discomfort of cartwheeling naked up to the podium without any notes.
Too Damn Long.
I didn’t actually do all thirty days of the challenge—I hit the word goal on day twenty-five and promptly stopped altogether—but thirty days of writing without rest is too much. It’s too damn much! I admire any writer capable of writing everyday, but I also wonder at (and am jealous of) the wiring that would allow anyone to put more than fifteen hundred words down each of those days.
I was most definitely over it by day twelve. I very nearly quit by day fifteen. At that point, I was pretty much just grimly pushing through in order to say I did it; which would, perhaps, be admirable if I wasn’t already certain my story was fundamentally flawed (see the bit about story structure below). This was not a marathon where I eventually broke free into a runner’s high and found some blissful stride; it was a painful march towards pretty severe burnout.
Ten days of this pace would be pretty great. Fourteen, maybe. After that I think every day of writing translated into a day of burnout later. I basically spent the first two weeks of December just shedding stress like a dog shedding their undercoat in spring; leaving little messes everywhere and really exasperating all the trying-to-be-understanding humans around me. (Thanksgiving may have contributed to that situation a bit; holiday stress is a real special blend of chemicals, isn’t it?)
Structure? What Structure?
My minimalistic outline did not provide a real story structure. Instead, it was just a short list of events that pushed the characters from bad to worse. I thought: this is fine, it’ll be a kind of action-y story, just something to breeze through. It was not. It was not at all. The story quickly became incoherent as I pulled some weird mental leaps to push event A to event B and then on to event C, as in ‘why the hell would any character agree to that?’ or ‘how is the character not exceptionally angry and just leaving right now?’ kinds of issues. It also lacked any sense of pacing. For a visual representation of my story’s action I invite you to picture two cats fighting: a bit of weird yowling and spitting, a lot of deeply uncomfortably but utterly silent staring, and the occasional furious flurry of paws flapping at (mostly) empty air and (sometimes) any face that dares to get too close.
I need to learn a whole lot about story structure. In fact, I need to learn so much, I don’t even know what it is that I don’t know. What exactly is story structure? Beats me. But I can tell you that I did not emulate my favorite storytellers at all and I most definitely noticed this by day twelve, and was certain I couldn’t fix it by day fifteen. But I didn’t want to go back to the drawing board, I wanted to finish the challenge, so I forged ahead—and I was right, nothing improved with persistence. Carry on? Uh, no. Lay down and give up? Yes. Yes, that’s more my speed. In my defense, I am going to think really hard about what went wrong while I lay here curled up in a ball; always be learnin’, right?
IT FELT SO RIGHT
One might be starting to get the impression NaNoWriMo was a complete waste of my time. It was not! On the contrary, it was unbelievably worthwhile. I say unbelievably because a) I’d spent so long turning my nose up at the exercise, and b) *gestures to all of the above bitching*, but it honestly feels like one of the greatest strides forward that I’ve yet made towards self-actualizing this desire to write a novel.
Like, hey, can we just pause and celebrate completing the 50k word count goal? That felt good. I mean, it felt exhausting and kind of hateful (I don’t want to unpack that) at the same time, but it was good. I’ve spent most of my adult life doing the things that I needed to do—and never an iota more. You know what I mean? My buddy Nick who also NaNoWriMoed with me does (these are his words, but they hold true for me as well). I’ve worked hard sometimes, sure, and done plenty of difficult things, yeah, but only ever when I really had to. I didn’t have to reach this goal. But I did. NaNoWriMo is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done that I simply did not have to do.
That’s worth celebrating.
But beyond the actual fact of meeting an arbitrary, self-policed goal, I also feel that I won some hard earned insight into what works for me and (as evidenced above) what doesn’t work for me. What works: I definitely like setting word count targets, I actually really benefit from pushing an exhausting pace, and I ended up really enjoying the sense of community around the whole affair.
Setting Goals. Who Knew?
Setting goals for oneself is really helpful. Who knew, right? Turns out defining success is a pretty good way to achieve it. I chose to go above the NaNoWriMo daily par goal of 1667 and instead aimed to hit an even 2000 words every day. This absolutely worked out for me. I hit my goal every day with a single exception: one day I stopped at 1800 words, but I wrote 2200 words the next day to make up the deficit.
Quick sidebar: nope, I never stopped at exactly 2k words. I’d always write a bit more, but not more than twenty or so. But I did always try to stop mid-sentence. I really liked the trick of ending in the middle of a thought, as it was easy for me to just resume it the next day and get the ball rolling right away.
Still, while the daily target was motivating, it was really the overall target that kept me going, and specifically watching how each day’s labor moved me closer to hitting that overall target of 50k words. Watching that steady progress is hugely motivating, and is absolutely something I want to incorporate into all my future projects.
Exhaustion Helps Me Be Kind
Writing 2k words a day for 25 days was exhausting and left me almost no energy for any other kind of creative work—nor for any kind of creative angst. In other words it took all my energy to reach my goal, and I had none left over for worrying about the quality of the writing. This was a good thing! I didn’t overthink anything.
I know, I know, I just complained above about how much I missed overthinking things, but hear me out. For the past year I’ve been writing first chapters to various stories—and then overthinking them. So I’d rewrite it. And then rewrite it again. And again. While I do want to be the kind of writer who goes through many, many revisions, this was getting excessive because I wasn’t actually learning anything about what the story wanted to be before I was already going back to the drawing board. Why indulge in this repetitive madness? Because my inner critic was harping on me to do better the entire time. I couldn’t silence the nagging sense that things just were not to taste, so like an overanxious cook I kept adding seasonings and stirring like mad until I realized I’d been stressing the minutiae so much I’d lost sight of what I was even cooking (burnt soup, mostly).
It turns out the solution for an over-active inner critic is to put that son of a bitch to work. We don’t have time for your anxiety, inner voice, we have a goal to reach! In the future I definitely want to set aside time for writing ‘sprints’ or the like; times where I give myself exhaustingly challenging word count goals to reach so I can just force myself to get a real chunk of writing out of my head and on to the screen.
Community Is Kinda Great
I’m an introvert and also so lazy, and consequently find balancing the reward-versus-stress of engaging with communities—even online spaces—pretty difficult. NaNoWriMo was kind of awesome because there was a sense of community, a sense of so many other people doing what I was doing—yay not alone in this absurd make believe—but I also didn’t feel like I had to do anything beyond simply participating. I created an account on the official website and updated my progress, but otherwise didn’t really engage with the wider community there. It was nice. It also wasn’t anything to take note of, really.
The real note here, though, is more local. While I didn’t do too much with the wider organization, I did engage with two of my friends who were also participating in the challenge and my god was it helpful to have them on this same journey. A few other friends didn’t participate, but they were invested and cheering us on, which was also pretty much the best. Even simple things like a thumbs up emoji in response to me reporting that I had hit the 10k mark was honestly a very powerful motivator. It was also delightful cathartic to hear when my friends were struggling; in part because I didn’t feel like the only one hitting rough patches when they would complain they were losing interest or running on empty tanks, and in part because it pushed me to keep going when I saw that they were forging on anyway.
No more writing alone! It is a bit of a burden to place on another human being to ask them to invest in your artistic projects, especially while they are still works in progress, and especially if you need to do some venting about the struggle, but I am resolving right here and now that I will at least ask my friends if they’re open to lending me their ear so I can whine when it’s tough and cheer when it’s feeling good.
SUMMARY OVER, RABBIT HOLE AHEAD
Hey you. Yeah, you. Want to go deeper into this rabbit hole with me? You do? Well, that’s great… but I’m going to cut this short for Substack. If you’re curious about any of the stats or interested in a more detailed breakdown of what did and didn’t work, I have more on my new blog.
Substack has been a, well, troubling place lately, and I’ve decided to begin moving away from it. Haven’t quite decided what to do, yet, but at the very least it seems wise to spread the eggs between more than one basket.
Let me know what you think. As always, thanks for reading, friends.