As November begins, so does NaNoWriMo--aka National Novel Writing month, where one tries to write fifty thousand words on a novel over the course of November. This year will be my fourth year attempting this, and if I manage to succeed, will be my third year winning. Since I’m starting to write a new project for NaNo, I thought I’d take you on a walk down memory lane for my past experiences trying to write fifty thousand words in November.
I first learned about NaNoWriMo from a YouTuber named Abbie Emmons, who makes advice videos on writing and has published her own books (would strongly recommend her if you’re looking to improve your writing). This was back before I was consistently writing on projects, and I thought it would be the perfect motivator to get back into the swing of things. So, I started writing on my first published novel, “Timing”, and for the first eighteen days, things went really well. But there was a lot going on in my life at that time, and unfortunately, I stopped writing, and didn’t finish my first NaNoWriMo attempt. However, as we’ve established, I’ve gone on to not only finish that novel, but also publish it, so I guess things worked out in the end.
In 2021, I was determined to finish NaNo. I finished the outline for the novel I wanted to write about a week and a half before the first of November, and I was feeling good. The desire to complete NaNo this year was what really got me into tracking my word count everyday, but that’s a discussion for a different day. As November first rolled around, I dove into the project, and I’m pleased to announce that I finished NaNoWriMo with a project I will never release, since I don’t like it, and it needs a lot of work that I just don’t want to put into it right now. While I was doing NaNo in 2021, however, I was actually working on three novels at once, and the other two, “Cora” and “Love Through Agony” have both been published, so the moral of this story is to not force yourself to work on a novel until its completion. And since I was tracking my word count on everything I was writing at this point, I feel like I’ve earned the right to brag about the fact that I wrote over one hundred thousand words that November, and I’m quite proud of that.
Last year, in 2022, I was struggling to make time for my writing as I got acquainted with the chaos that is university, and writing on a project for NaNoWriMo was the perfect way to motivate myself to write. And though I didn’t write nearly as much as I had done the year before, I successfully completed NaNoWriMo for the second year in a row, and the novel I was working on, “Selena” was released in March of 2023.
What have I learned from doing NaNoWriMo? Lots of things, actually. I’ve learned that having a word count goal such as that (writing 1667 words every day, or if you’re an overachiever like me, 1670 words) is good motivation, especially if you don’t have a lot of time, or want to get back into the swing of writing. I also learned that obsessively tracking your word count kind of sucks the fun out of writing, and wasn’t the healthiest thing for me. Overall, though, I love NaNo, and I’m incredibly excited to start writing this year’s project, “Love Through Anguish”.
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