For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It was intended as a challenge to writers to write a 50,000-word first draft of a novel in 30 days, specifically in the month of November. That’s 1,667 words a day, if you average it out between the 30 days.
I am not here to discuss the goods or bads of NaNoWriMo, nor to discuss any scandals around its organizers or anything like that. It’s over now, and it was what it was at the time.
This blog post is simply for me to put out my experiences with it, what I took from it, and so on. Any opinions and experiences are my own. I will say upfront that I don’t participate any longer and haven’t for years, but I think you’ll understand why by the end of the post.
I first learned about it in the summer of 2009 and decided I was going to go for it. Knowing my writing habits and tendencies at the time, I knew right away that the word count wouldn’t be the challenge; finishing a story would be. At the time, my finished/unfinished ratio of projects was awful. I did (and still often do) struggle with around the 2/3 - 3/5 sections of writing. I’m great at buildup and setup, and I’m not bad at climaxes, either. But the last push to story crux and the denouement are some of my weaker parts of stories. At the time, I was pretty purely a pantser. That is, I just wrote by the seat of my pants. It wasn’t so much that I wrote myself into corners as I lost interest trying to solve problems rather than cause more.
So I knew going into fall and eventually November that I needed a plan. I needed to try something I hadn’t done before: outlining a project. I would need a map so I didn’t write like 37,000 words and then peter out because I was bored and didn’t know where to go. No, I needed to know where I was going up front.
Long story short, now I’m a huge supporter of outlining. I still allow myself a fair amount of pantsing while doing the writing, but that’s details. I’ve already done a 3-post discourse on my outlining process as it is now, 16 years later, if you’re interested.
Outlining Post 1
Outlining Post 2
Outlining Post 3
Suffice it to say, I’m currently using that method right now, working on the outline for my LitRPG novel, working title Subscription Life.
I digress.
Over the course of the late summer and early fall, I outlined a novel. Come November 1, I started writing it.
I hit the 50,000 word mark on November 9th.
I’m not kidding. I remember it quite vividly, even now. I also recall that there were 3 days I didn’t write at all. I legitimately wrote 50,000 words in 6 actual days. There was still wrapping up to do, some outline left, and I did end up finishing the novel in whole.
That novel was my first published one, Empeddigo. And oh, how I do cringe thinking about it now, but that’s the way with early works. I revised and published it the following year and was poised to NaNo again in 2010.
Over the course of the next couple years, I was a NaNo fiend. I even did NEpMo, which was a random challenge I found in the same vein. That one was to write a 5,000-line epic poem in the month of May. Pretty sure I did that in 2010 as well. That was my second book, The Trials of Hallac. Also pretty cringe, but what are you going to do?
So through 2010, 2011, and 2012 for sure, a lot of my writing life revolved around NaNoWriMo. I went to local write-ins and loved them. The atmosphere was always great, writing sprints were a fun mini-challenge, and it was great to be surrounded by other writers. We’d talk about our projects, hover over our keyboards side by side, and got to know each other a little.
But foremost, it was about the word count.
And that was where it became a problem for me.
I’m VERY driven by numbers, in a lot of ways like I am driven by words. Math is a game. Numbers and words are both toys I use in different ways, but damn do I obsess about them. My drive became in getting higher word counts faster. I made the first week of November a regular staycation so I could just write. I made a big pot of chili the last day or two of October and lived off that while I secluded myself to knock out thousands of words. I strained to break 20,000 words on NOVEMBER FIRST. Never quite made it, but I got close a few times. 10k word days were no stranger to me.
I believe one year, I actually finished NaNo on like day 5. But it got worse. At least twice, I DOUBLE NaNo’d, as they say. Meaning I wrote 100,000 words in 30 days. I even went for a triple NaNo but ended up running out of material. I finished the book draft.
In general, I wouldn’t think such a thing was a problem. I was eating and taking care of hygiene. I went to work on time, did my job, and took care of life outside the word processor.
But I eventually came to the realization that while yes, I was cranking out words like I was running out of time, they weren’t good words. Sure, that’s what editing is for. But damn, was I paring down a LOT. Tons of fluff, unneeded description, rehashing of the same thought or idea, repeated description, meandering conversation. Yes, I know I just did exactly that in the list of things. That’s the point.
I made all those things in search of that ridiculous word count.
I was focused purely on quantity, not on quality.
I could do better, I decided. And that’s when I realized I’d gotten everything I could out of NaNoWriMo. It was great reason to write, but there were also a lot of people who wouldn’t write anything UNLESS it was November, and that wasn’t the best practice. All the wrong lessons there.
I recognized fatigue in myself after that frantic writing, too. Often, I didn’t write another word until the January after, or maybe even February. That was no way to practice a craft.
So I absolutely think there is value in writing challenges like NaNoWriMo. I learned a lot about writing, my own writing tendencies and habits, and how I can function under stress and deadlines. And I did make some amazing words in all that fluff. There was just a lot of the fluff that had to be pulled away. It was the quality I wanted, and if I focused on that, there was no way to hit NaNo for me without being even more stressed. I learned a lot from NaNo, took what I learned, and let it go.
I used to be a guy who did NaNoWriMo. I outgrew it, and that’s fine.
I am not here to discuss the goods or bads of NaNoWriMo, nor to discuss any scandals around its organizers or anything like that. It’s over now, and it was what it was at the time.
This blog post is simply for me to put out my experiences with it, what I took from it, and so on. Any opinions and experiences are my own. I will say upfront that I don’t participate any longer and haven’t for years, but I think you’ll understand why by the end of the post.
I first learned about it in the summer of 2009 and decided I was going to go for it. Knowing my writing habits and tendencies at the time, I knew right away that the word count wouldn’t be the challenge; finishing a story would be. At the time, my finished/unfinished ratio of projects was awful. I did (and still often do) struggle with around the 2/3 - 3/5 sections of writing. I’m great at buildup and setup, and I’m not bad at climaxes, either. But the last push to story crux and the denouement are some of my weaker parts of stories. At the time, I was pretty purely a pantser. That is, I just wrote by the seat of my pants. It wasn’t so much that I wrote myself into corners as I lost interest trying to solve problems rather than cause more.
So I knew going into fall and eventually November that I needed a plan. I needed to try something I hadn’t done before: outlining a project. I would need a map so I didn’t write like 37,000 words and then peter out because I was bored and didn’t know where to go. No, I needed to know where I was going up front.
Long story short, now I’m a huge supporter of outlining. I still allow myself a fair amount of pantsing while doing the writing, but that’s details. I’ve already done a 3-post discourse on my outlining process as it is now, 16 years later, if you’re interested.
Outlining Post 1
Outlining Post 2
Outlining Post 3
Suffice it to say, I’m currently using that method right now, working on the outline for my LitRPG novel, working title Subscription Life.
I digress.
Over the course of the late summer and early fall, I outlined a novel. Come November 1, I started writing it.
I hit the 50,000 word mark on November 9th.
I’m not kidding. I remember it quite vividly, even now. I also recall that there were 3 days I didn’t write at all. I legitimately wrote 50,000 words in 6 actual days. There was still wrapping up to do, some outline left, and I did end up finishing the novel in whole.
That novel was my first published one, Empeddigo. And oh, how I do cringe thinking about it now, but that’s the way with early works. I revised and published it the following year and was poised to NaNo again in 2010.
Over the course of the next couple years, I was a NaNo fiend. I even did NEpMo, which was a random challenge I found in the same vein. That one was to write a 5,000-line epic poem in the month of May. Pretty sure I did that in 2010 as well. That was my second book, The Trials of Hallac. Also pretty cringe, but what are you going to do?
So through 2010, 2011, and 2012 for sure, a lot of my writing life revolved around NaNoWriMo. I went to local write-ins and loved them. The atmosphere was always great, writing sprints were a fun mini-challenge, and it was great to be surrounded by other writers. We’d talk about our projects, hover over our keyboards side by side, and got to know each other a little.
But foremost, it was about the word count.
And that was where it became a problem for me.
I’m VERY driven by numbers, in a lot of ways like I am driven by words. Math is a game. Numbers and words are both toys I use in different ways, but damn do I obsess about them. My drive became in getting higher word counts faster. I made the first week of November a regular staycation so I could just write. I made a big pot of chili the last day or two of October and lived off that while I secluded myself to knock out thousands of words. I strained to break 20,000 words on NOVEMBER FIRST. Never quite made it, but I got close a few times. 10k word days were no stranger to me.
I believe one year, I actually finished NaNo on like day 5. But it got worse. At least twice, I DOUBLE NaNo’d, as they say. Meaning I wrote 100,000 words in 30 days. I even went for a triple NaNo but ended up running out of material. I finished the book draft.
In general, I wouldn’t think such a thing was a problem. I was eating and taking care of hygiene. I went to work on time, did my job, and took care of life outside the word processor.
But I eventually came to the realization that while yes, I was cranking out words like I was running out of time, they weren’t good words. Sure, that’s what editing is for. But damn, was I paring down a LOT. Tons of fluff, unneeded description, rehashing of the same thought or idea, repeated description, meandering conversation. Yes, I know I just did exactly that in the list of things. That’s the point.
I made all those things in search of that ridiculous word count.
I was focused purely on quantity, not on quality.
I could do better, I decided. And that’s when I realized I’d gotten everything I could out of NaNoWriMo. It was great reason to write, but there were also a lot of people who wouldn’t write anything UNLESS it was November, and that wasn’t the best practice. All the wrong lessons there.
I recognized fatigue in myself after that frantic writing, too. Often, I didn’t write another word until the January after, or maybe even February. That was no way to practice a craft.
So I absolutely think there is value in writing challenges like NaNoWriMo. I learned a lot about writing, my own writing tendencies and habits, and how I can function under stress and deadlines. And I did make some amazing words in all that fluff. There was just a lot of the fluff that had to be pulled away. It was the quality I wanted, and if I focused on that, there was no way to hit NaNo for me without being even more stressed. I learned a lot from NaNo, took what I learned, and let it go.
I used to be a guy who did NaNoWriMo. I outgrew it, and that’s fine.
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