 
 
I’m what you might call a NaNoWriMo veteran. A member since 2016, I’ve “won” seven out of the nine times I’ve participated and written over 440K words. This includes Camp NaNoWriMo, which takes place in April and July of every year. My debut novel, A Delicious Dilemma (Harlequin Special Edition), was drafted and revised during two separate NaNoWriMo challenges. Now, I’ve just completed a very rough draft of book two in the Navarro Family Series which I began before this last NaNoWriMo, one of two additional books that I contracted with Harlequin Special Edition.
I experience a thrill every time NaNoWriMo rolls around, feeding off the energy that comes from a collective decision to make nothing else matter more during the month of November than getting the damned book written. It leads to the rush of reaching what appears to be the insurmountable goal of writing 50K words in one month, a reward for so many sacrifices.
What began in 2016 as a quest for community to ameliorate the otherwise lonely business of writing has become a a ritual reminder to honor my writing. It is the permission I give myself to organize, if only for thirty days, the entirety of my energies around the singular purpose of getting 50K words onto a page in one month. NaNoWriMo has become indispensable to my writing life, and never more so than during the disorienting trauma of a global pandemic.
Here are five things I learned from NaNoWriMo.
Your writing is worth prioritizing
For one month (not taking into account the time to plan a project – more on that shortly), I have permission to think of my project and only my project with unapologetic zeal. As a published author who is also juggling a full-time career and a family, there is something incredibly self-indulgent about making one month all about my writing. In November, I give myself the luxury to do what the realities of my day-to-day life do not always allow me to do – make writing my laser-focused priority, a necessary reminder that it’s okay to put myself and my passions first.
The devil is in the planning
One important thing NaNoWriMo taught me to do is to plan for success. I spend a couple of weeks in October planning my life in the service of chasing those 1600 words per day – precooked meals, transportation for after school activities, lesson plans, regular exercise, even sleep. I’ve done NaNoWriMo, both during the big event in November as well as the Camps in April and July. I am most effective when I begin the month with either projects in progress or novels that are already extensively outlined. I also have a system in place to document my word count, with rewards built in for milestones, and flexibility for downtime to recover from the inevitable exhaustion of the last stretch of writing. This habit of planning carries over to other projects I start during the remainder of the year as well. Not everyone needs this level of detailed planning to reach their writing goals, but I’ve found that I do better when I predict obstacles and have a plan in place to address those. Whether you are a planner, panster, or some combination of the two, what matters is to create habits that work for you.
Writers write – any way they can
To reach the goal of writing 50k in one month, I have to be ruthless about grabbing time to write. I learned to take advantage of any increment of time greater than 10 minutes – including waking up early to do a Pomodoro sprint, sneaking in words during lunch, utilizing the precious hour and a half between the end of my work day and the afternoon race to pick up my son, get him to his after school activities, work a little exercise in of my own, throw dinner together, and check school/homework before hustling the family to their bed times. No sliver of time is left unused. It’s relentless, but the way I calculate it, with the Thanksgiving break I get each year as a school teacher, I only have to keep up that grind for 15 out of the 30 days available in November, so I’m merciless about making that time count.
The only way to get through it is to…get through it
Inevitably, there’s always that moment when, even after all the planning, preparation, and hustling, you look at your manuscript and ask yourself what hell you’re doing. Everything you write is horrible, you keep dropping threads or themes as you race to the end. Or worse, you get to a place beyond which you can’t write. Some gnarl of plot that you didn’t predict, some aspect you didn’t think through deeply enough. NaNoWriMo forced me to work through strategies to keep those obstacles from stopping my progress. I learned that the only way to get to the end of the manuscript is to write through, over, or around the problem. I leave myself notes, either in the margin or in the manuscript itself, describing what I am trying to accomplish and just keep going. Sometimes it’s nothing more than <Write this out> or <Transition>. I don’t have the luxury of looping back and revising the problems I find. I have to keep going and get to the end. If the problem is an impossible one, I take a day off and let my mind work on the problem, but no more than one day, for fear I’ll lose my momentum. There is only one way to reach my goal and that is to plow through to the end. After all, that’s what editing is for!
Even when you lose, you win
Out of the nine times I took on NaNoWriMo, I successfully reached my goal seven times. However, I don’t consider those two times I didn’t reach my goals as losses. On one project, I wrote nearly 33k towards my 50k goal and wrote 26k towards the second one. In each case, I ended the month with more words than I started and, especially with the 26k project, I didn’t give up on it but kept writing, using the subsequent NaNoWriMo to revise it. That draft became my debut novel, A Delicious Dilemma, which also won the Write for Harlequin mentorship. Every single word is one word more than I had before and if nothing else, NaNoWriMo taught me to celebrate every step that got me closer to my goal. Because that’s how books are written. One word, one sentence, one challenge at a time until you finally write The End.
