What am I doing on Thanksgiving? Posting about NaNoWriMo! The following is a piece that I wrote for my college newspaper, the Sentinel. (You can check it out on the Sentinel website here.)
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This month, I’ve been
working on a project: writing a novel in 30 days. I promise it’s not as crazy
as it sounds.
November is National
Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Every year, beginning Nov. 1, thousands
of writers all over the world try to pen a 50,000-word novel before the stroke
of midnight on Nov. 30. To finish on time, participants have to pen about 1,667
words per day.
My desktop background
is a candy-colored calendar announcing what word count goal I should reach each
day. It looks friendly at first. Cheerful, even. But the more I stare at it,
the more I feel like those bright little squares are taunting me. They look
sort of smug, with their steadily-increasing numbers. Sometimes that calendar
starts to resemble a glass mountain—once I get close to the summit, my idea
will wither up, I’ll slip, and it’ll all be downhill from there.
Well, you know what,
candy-colored calendar? Challenge accepted.
Some people shut down
when they’re given a deadline. I am not one of those people. In fact, I
sometimes think that I do my best work when it’s coming down to the wire. It’s
not that I’m a low-level thrill-seeker who likes the uncertainty of
procrastination. It’s that a looming deadline causes me to roll up my sleeves
and attack my task with renewed vigor.
During last year’s
NaNoWriMo, for instance, I’d fallen behind considerably. In addition to being
swamped with school and other obligations, I’d been stuck on how the plot
should continue. Suddenly I was staring at the calendar and realizing that, if
I wanted to reach the goal, I would have to write over 10,000 words in just a
few days.
I sat down at my
keyboard, expecting the weight of that task to crash down on me—but it didn’t.
In fact, in that moment when I understood just how much work I had left to do
and how little time I had to complete it, it was like the fog cleared. I knew
exactly what should happen next in the story, and exactly how I was going to
get there. The words flowed and I hit 50,000 words with time to spare. There’s
nothing like a seemingly-impossible deadline to motivate a girl to—well, do the
impossible.
I think we can all
learn something from NaNoWriMo. These 30 days and nights of literary abandon
aren’t just about writing a novel: They’re about challenging ourselves to try
something new and seemingly-unfeasible, then rising to meet that challenge.
NaNoWriMo is about
testing the limits of our dedication, creativity and resourcefulness. It’s about
facing a problem, then wrestling that problem to the ground, hog-tying it and moving
on to the next. At its heart, NaNoWriMo is a chance to try something new.
Every year, I use
NaNoWriMo to test my skills as a writer. This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve
participated in NaNoWriMo three times before, and “won” (that is, reached 50,000
words) twice. I may have hit the 50,000-word mark two years running, but that
doesn’t make the task any less daunting when the next November rolls around,
and it certainly doesn’t mean that I have nothing to learn or gain from the
experience.
With that said, I think
I’ll take a few minutes to work on my NaNo novel. At the time of this writing,
I’m ahead of where I should be, and I plan to keep it that way.
Take that,
candy-colored calendar.
