NaNoWriMo - a personal appreciation

by James Broomfield

It’s mid-October and for me, for the last two years, that’s meant I’ve started to think about NaNoWriMo. This isn’t a ‘What is…’ article, it’s more a personal appreciation and a bit of detail about how it works for me. I wanted to write it because NaNoWriMo does work for me, really well. I doubt I’d have finished a draft of a novel without it.

As I discover, forget, and rediscover frequently with regards to creative endeavours – restriction is absolutely essential. Give me complete freedom and watch me go to pieces. Put up barriers, limit my choices, obstruct and sabotage me at every step and you might just get some results. The creative brain loves to think its way out of a box. NaNoWriMo is my kind of box.

I’d been aware of NaNoWriMo for quite a while before I did it. I’d always had a kind of snobby reaction to it. I think its because somewhere, deep down, I cling to that romantic notion that a novel comes into being through an act of intense, divine inspiration – as opposed to daily hard work. Of course, this isn’t the case – ask anyone who has actually written a novel. But it’s a stubborn idea for me.

So, after 20-odd years of imagining that I could write novels and none having actually been written, I had to admit that a different approach might be worth trying. In 2018 I got myself a NaNoWriMo account and announced my intention to finally write a novel.

Okay, maybe it’s sort of a ‘What is…’ article.

I’m going to assume that if you’re a writer you’ve probably heard of NaNoWriMo and have at least a vague idea of what it is. The NaNoWriMo website has everything you need to know, but here’s my quick summary for the uninitiated/reluctant clicker. NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month takes place every November and it’s a global event. The basic idea is that you write, every day, for 30 days with the aim of hitting a 50,000 word* target by the end of the month. Voila, your novel just got novelled.

The NaNoWriMo site allows you to create an account, announce your project and upload daily word counts. It presents you with some basic analytics so you can see your progress, whether you’re ahead or behind. It also provides access to local groups of people who are doing the same thing if you need some support. Throughout the month the site supports your progress with achievement badges and pep talks from authors who know what you’re going through.

My achievement badges from 2019 - curiously gratifying!

How NaNoWriMo worked for me

In 2018 I completed the 50,000 word challenge. It was the most consistently productive I had ever been with my writing and it felt amazing. Not just to complete a challenge, although that was gratifying, but also to get all those characters and scenes that had been writing and rewriting themselves in my head for years out and into a document. It created space, space I could use to start thinking about the gaps in the story.

Undertaking NaNoWriMo meant first I had to make some changes in how I typically write. The format of Nano does not allow for some of my personal writing quirks – this is a good thing; those quirks were detrimental to my progress. These are personal. You may share some, others may be no problem for you at all. Perhaps you have other issues which NaNoWriMo might help you avoid.

Firstly, I had to give myself permission to write absolute rubbish. NaNoWriMo makes this essential in my opinion. I can’t imagine completing it if I was constantly self-editing. Removing the pressure to produce something worthwhile freed me up to write. Nothing mattered, as long as I got to the daily word count. Getting over the feeling that it was fraudulent to add to a word count with words I knew were no good was important. I never sunk as low as writing the same word over and over, but there were days when I was embarrassed at what I was typing, as I was typing it. Forget it and move on. You have to.

When I read those rubbish words back, they’re rarely as bad as I thought and do an important job. Uninspired or cliched as they are, they communicate accurately what I was thinking. I’m never left wondering what I meant, and writing better words isn’t usually a problem.

Secondly, I needed to write every day, whether I wanted to or not. This is what many successful writers will tell you is the real secret to writing – the daily practice. Nano provides increased incentives to do this – there’s a visceral pleasure in seeing that graph go up day by day, of trying to keep your progress line above the target line. I don’t know if the visual aspect is important, I suspect it is. I seem to get a dopamine hit from seeing that progress line rise that I don’t get from just seeing my word count numbers go up.

After a Day 11 wobble, I played catch up for the rest of the month!

Thirdly, I had to write non-sequentially. In my short story writing, I have the whole thing in my head before I write. And I start at the start and work through to the end. A novel is too big to fit in my head. I had characters, I had important events, I had scenes even that I’d worked out. But I didn’t know the whole story. With NaNoWriMo, that daily word count and pressure to write meant I had to write what I knew. At the start I was almost just transcribing scenes I already knew, there was very little creation going on. By the end of the month, I’d exhausted my stored-up scenes, I’d written the beginning, the end and many key scenes in between and now had to work out how to get from one to another.

Fourthly is the deadline. In my professional writing life, deadlines are a given. In creative writing, not so much. No one is waiting to read my novel, no one is going to refuse to pay me if I don’t deliver. I’m not a person who can give myself an arbitrary deadline and stick to it – I don’t have that faculty. But NaNoWriMo gives me a 30-day deadline. It’s still arbitrary, it still has no teeth but somehow, for a reason I don’t understand, it’s effective. It makes me focus.

In my experience, the 30-day limit is valuable in two ways. Firstly, I know I can sustain enthusiasm for that length of time. Knowing that it will inevitably end is key to maintaining momentum. It provides a related function for my family. Writing 1800 words a day takes time – time that would otherwise be spent with them or doing things that directly or indirectly make life easier for them. Even when I’m not writing, my mind is often elsewhere – deep in a fantasy world of my own creation, playing out the scenes I’ll write tomorrow. It can be hard for loved ones to understand why you have to be there, why you can’t come back to reality when you step away from the page. It helps for them to know that this is a time-limited thing too.

2019 The Return

In 2019, I went back for a second NaNoWriMo. I felt less confident this time, knowing what was in store. I hadn’t really worked on the novel much in the time between. I had been thinking about it and working up new scenes, but I didn’t know if I had another 50,000 words of story to write. Turned out, I did. It was harder this time, with less of my story ready to be transcribed, more on-the-fly creation. My progress line dipped under the mean for success several times and I was playing catch-up a lot. My last writing session on the last day of November 2019 required much more from me than the daily average. But I got there. I finished the first draft of 105,000 words and the sense of achievement was unbelievable. I’d done something I’d been saying I was going to do for years, decades.

It was done.

Except it isn’t

Of course, it’s not done. A first draft is exactly that. And remember all that rubbish I gave myself permission to write? It’s all still in there. There are probably gaps too, things I thought I wrote which I haven’t. Things I wrote later which haven’t been properly set up yet. Thematically it’s all over the place in a way which I’m not sure is resolvable.

So, what about this year. Until recently I’ve been in two minds about how to approach Nano ’20. There’s a ton of work to do on that 1st draft. NaNoWriMo is flexible enough that a rewrite could be a viable project. But I have other novel ideas, new and old, queuing up to be written. Should I use Nano to start a new project?

It’s a toughy. I’m sure there’s much I’d learn from doing that 2nd draft – it’d also be nice to actually get it into a state where I could show it to someone (not something I’d be comfortable doing currently). But also, I doubt it’s a commercially viable piece of fiction and that is the ultimate goal for me – publication. Other ideas might take me further down that road faster.

I’ve not yet decided, though I’ll have to soon. Either way I’m anitcipating the challenge again, and the achievement that follows.

If you’ve struggled to turn your writing dreams into reality, can’t seem to get the words out or find focusing on your writing a struggle, I can’t recommend  NaNoWriMo enough. You can go to the website here and sign up, announce your project and start looking forward to having a novel written by the end of November.

If you do decide to give it a go, I wish you luck - and add me as a buddy on the website if you like, I’ll help any way I can.

A couple of other things!

The Community

One aspect of NaNoWriMo I’ve not written about yet, and one which will be very important to a lot of people, is the social side of it. There are groups everywhere, you can get in touch with local coordinators and join a supportive group of people who you are doing the same thing you are. The reason I’ve not written about it is because it’s not an aspect I’ve used. I did meet my local group, quite by accident. I was writing in a café on the last day of NaNoWriMo 2019 and I noticed on the other side of the room a group of people buried in their laptops, one had a Viking helmet on (the NaNoWriMo logo is a Viking helmet). When I’d finished writing I went over and said hello and they were very friendly but also very young and very female and I felt old and creepy! I’m certain that in other places you’ll find groups as diverse as you would wish. Sadly, Covid-19 means no face-to-face meetings this year, but they’ll doubtless happen online.

Scrivener

When you complete NaNoWriMo, you get discount codes and other bits and bobs. One of these is 50% off the price of Scrivener – a software package that helps you structure your creative writing. I’ve found Scrivener unbelievably helpful in keeping my novel under control. It’s so much better than just having a huge Word document. My novel is broken down into parts, chapters and scenes and I can see what state each scene is in (i.e. whether I’ve rewritten it, moved it, deleted it etc.) There are other software packages that do similar things, I just haven’t used them.

*Only 50,000 words? Yes. There are various opinions on how many words officially makes a novel. Be in no doubt, 50,000 words is a short novel. But it *is* a novel, and there are many books generally recognised as novels that come in way shorter than that – Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, Breakfast at Tiffany’s would all fall short of NaNoWriMo’s target by at least 20,000 words.