Did I Achieve My Crazy Goal for Day One of NaNoWriMo?

Today was my very first day of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. And here’s how it went…

I arrived at the kick-off event in Laurel, MD, at around 9:00 am. Armed with my laptop, my research books, three bottles of Vitamin Water, and 36 yogurts to share, I was ready to start my 1-month journey of writing the first 50,000 words of Designing America… or die trying.

Okay, not die, but definitely heave a sigh of regret. Same dif when you’re a melodramatic writer.

Anywho, I knew I had two challenges to overcome in this first week of NaNo, starting with the fear that I had already exceeded my creative quota for the quarter. In a pre-NaNo prep period, I had challenged myself to write 2,000 words per day of Flights of Fancy, the conclusion to the Faerietales series. And boy, did I do good with the test-run, completing 40,000 words in 17 days.

That’s awesome! Right? But also a little intimidating.

I mean, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get my ideas down on paper. I barely struggled at all with writer’s block, leading me to wonder whether I would pay for that effortlessness when the deadline actually “mattered.”

I put quotation marks around the word “mattered” because NaNo doesn’t dictate anything. There are no prizes other than bragging rights that I know of. Yet I suppose I’m too competitive for my own good, because I’ve told myself that this shindig “matters” and so therefore it must.

My other concern going into Day 1 was the fact that I have a crazy week ahead of me with little time to write. Faeriecon is this Friday to Sunday, and Thursday night is going to be spent checking out what I have to work with there. So basically, today had to count for five days.

If I’m sticking to my 2,000-word goal, that’s 10,000 words down on paper by midnight, my official bedtime, which translates to a whole lot of pressure.

So how did I do?

I’m proud – no, thrilled. Ecstatic, even! – to say that at 9:24 pm, just shy of 12 hours after I wrote my first word, I hit that target. (Just for the record, there were a lot of breaks in there, sometimes hours long.) I can’t promise I won’t revise every single sentence I put down when I go back to edit the first draft, but hey…

As the cutesy little NaNo sticker I got puts it, this month is all about three things:

·         Moments of pure genius

·         Gaping plot holes

·         Unintelligible typos.

In which case, I’m right on track!

My Personal Challenge for November

November is almost upon us. And for writers, that means one thing: National Novel Writing Month, or NaNo!

As I explained in Monday’s blog, that’s the challenge to jot down the first 50,000 words to your next novel. What I didn’t mention is that I’ve never done it.

That’s not to say I’ve never completed the challenge so much. It’s more like I’ve never started it in the first place. In past years, I was always in the middle of a manuscript when November rolled around and unwilling to set it aside to start something new.

However, lo and behold, October dawned to the perfect situation… I had published all the books I’d planned on publishing for the year… I knew I’d soon complete the third draft of the first book I’ll be publishing in 2016 – Faerietales 4: Wing and Dagger… and I had finished up my research for Designing America, the story of the Battle of Yorktown, Virginia, and the sequel to Maiden America.

It was perfect!

Admittedly, since that was October 1st and there was no way I could go a whole month without writing anything, I started Faerietales 5: Flights of Fancy as a test run to see if NaNo was possible. I’ve always been skeptical of anyone apart from professional authors – who get paid to write all day – being able to write 50,000 words in one month.

Turns out though, it is possible! I started officially working on Flights of Fancy on October 15, and as of October 25, I was 26,000 words in. That’s an average 2,363 words per day! Moreover, I even had a social life during that time and worked some projects for my freelance business, Innovative Editing.

Admittedly, I’m also single and my day job involves sometimes significant downtime. So that certainly didn’t hurt. Neither did the fact that writer’s block hasn’t kicked in yet. I’m on a roll!

I don’t expect Designing America to be anywhere so easy, in large part because it’s a historical novel and I’m going to have to be flipping through my research books every other second to make sure I remember my facts correctly. Moreover, there’s no pressure right now; it’s not NaNo. Come next week, I might be making myself sick trying to make something happen that’s just not meant to be.

The 50,000-word deadline, I mean, not the novel itself. That’s happening one way or the other.

But hey… Bring it on! If nothing else, I’m more than ready to try.

A Personal Challenge That Could Drive You Crazy

Ever heard of NaNoWriMo?

Yeah, neither did I until a few years ago, when I joined a writer’s group in Columbia, MD.

At that point, I’d written four novels and was working on a fifth. Yet I guess I was writing in a vacuum, because I never knew there was a National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo, or NaNo.

The goal of NaNo is to write 50,000 words in a single month. Supposedly, 50,000 words is a whole novel. I strongly disagree with this, but perhaps it’s a decent first draft of a whole novel if your first drafts tend to be bare-bones details.

Regardless, people shun friends, family and sanity in order to accomplish this, participating in NaNo write-ins and keeping track of their work on nanowrimo.org and such. They even go to “prep school” in the waning days of October to learn how to best organize themselves for the writing road ahead.

Some accomplish their goal of 50,000 words. Admittedly, most do not. You kinda can’t have a life in order to exit this challenge victorious.

In other words, yes, it’s a crazy idea to begin with and the writing community gets even crazier about it. All for books they probably won’t ever finish and even fewer will publish. So in the end, there’s no need for them to be pulling out their hair over the issue.

Illustrating that truth is a meme I found recently from 101reasonstostopwriting.com that says: “NaNoWriMo: The challenge of an arbitrary target and deadline without the burden of any expectation of quality.”

True dat.

All the same, I don’t think it’s a complete waste of time. How can it be when it’s a chance to push yourself harder than you have been… to put down the remote, set aside the excuses and just write already. And let’s face it, most of us need that kind of motivation.

If you need any advice on trying NaNo, check out the official National Novel Writing Month website, www.nanowrimo.org, or contact JDiLouie@InnovativeEditing.com.

November is just around the corner… Why not go crazy?