For the first time since 2019, I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month this year. For those not as immersed in the online writing community as I am, National Novel Writing Month is an annual event in November, where writers challenge themselves to write fifty thousand words of a novel over thirty days. For more information, you can visit nanowrimo.org.
Anyway, I haven’t participated since 2019 because the initial stages of the pandemic totally destroyed my ability to focus on anything long-form, so I decided to take the opportunity to explore writing short stories, which was a more successful endeavour than I’d initially anticipated (see my fiction page for published stories). But I’ve been missing the space to play that novels provide.
So, since I finished another draft of the novel I had been working on before the pandemic, I decided it was time to work on a brand-new novel.
I spent October planning my plot and characters and reminding myself of the worldbuilding for this setting(this novel takes place in the same world as a couple of the projects I’ve worked on previously). By the end of October, I couldn’t wait to start writing and when November 1st hit, I was super excited to start. That excitement has held for the first week of NaNo. Every day, I’m eager to sit down and write, and when I’m finished for the day, I mostly like what I’ve written, and I’m excited to keep going into the next day. So far, I haven’t hit any snags or been bogged down by indecision, and it’s been exhilarating.
Sometimes, no matter how much I love to write, the writing process can be excruciating and exhausting. You write and write, and nothing seems to be going how you want. And sometimes, writing can make you feel like you’re soaring. I live for those types of writing days, where the words flow and my mind feels like it’s on fire (in a good way), and I’m reminded why it is that I love this craft so much.
The first week of NaNo has been like that this year. I feel rejuvenated and passionate about my work, and that’s a beautiful thing to feel, especially since the last several years have been difficult for me from a mental and physical health perspective.
Here’s hoping that I can cling to this feeling through the rest of November without burning out or impacting my health.
My Progress so Far
As demonstrated by the above image, I’m well on my way to hitting the fifty-thousand-word mark early. I’ve logged some excellent writing days with high word counts. There have been a couple of days where I struggled a bit. One day, I wrote less than the daily 1667 words necessary to hit the fifty thousand because I had a super busy and high-stress morning, spent the afternoon asleep, and then managed to sneak in some words in the hour before bed. I’ll be honest: that day, I took my laptop into bed to write and nearly fell asleep on my keyboard so I won’t beat myself up for the smaller word count.
There have been other days where I’ve had a phenomenal word count to make up for the lower word count days, so it all balances out.
- November 1: 3704 words
- November 2: 1770 words
- November 3: 3563 words
- November 4: 1887 words
- November 5: 4745 words
- November 6: 1472 words
- November 7: 4219 words
But more than my word count, I’m proud of the way I’ve been approaching this project. Usually, with NaNoWriMo, I try to write as many words as quickly as possible without taking any time to go back and make changes or pause to make up a name or a world-building detail. I just put a note in brackets and keep going, which means I have more work to do on the revision end to make the draft fit for consumption by my critique group. This year, I’m doing it differently. I’m taking the time to build my world and name characters. I’m pausing to come up with descriptions. Also, at the start of every day, if there’s something I forgot to incorporate in what I wrote during the previous days, I’m going back to insert it. I used to think that if I did that sort of thing, it would break my momentum or I’d get too caught up in making one scene perfect that I wouldn’t make much progress, but I’ve finally found a balance that works for me: I’m writing quickly, and my draft won’t be a complete disaster by the end of the month.
That said, I’ve got a long way to go before I finish this novel. It’s a secondary-world fantasy novel with multiple points of view, so it will probably wind up being at least one hundred thousand words in length, which would still make it pretty bare bones since I need more words than the average contemporary fiction novel to build the world and its customs and the magic system.
My goal is to write as much of this novel as possible during the month of November. If I want to finish it, I’ll have to increase my average daily word count by at least a few hundred words.
That said, I don’t want to burn myself out this month. I want to enjoy this process, so if I find myself sacrificing my joy for my word count, I’ll slow down because word count isn’t everything.
If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo this year and want support, please add me as a buddy on the official NaNoWriMo site. I’ll also be hosting some writing sessions online. Follow the links below to sign up (times are listed in Australian Western Standard Time):