NaNoWriMo For The Win — How I Wrote An Obscene Amount Of Words In November

Welp, it’s December! The calendar proclaims it is so and I’ve never been one to argue with time. Except for that one time when I “hour shamed” 59 minutes. Another story, another… time.

Hey NaNoWriMo nonny! Hey NaNoWriMo nonny!

I did it! I wrote an earth shattering, mind quaking 50,000 words of my novel in the month of November. The full book is now tottering in somewhere around 75K and I require air.

I’m nervous to go back in! I blasted through that thing without looking back. I’m pretty sure there is close to zero artistic integrity within. All it is is a rickety skeleton in desperate need of some flesh. Even so, those shaky bones aren’t even complete yet. They still need a few ribs and phalanges.

Do you follow? Do I?

I don’t have the proper words anymore. November has spent me and spit me out naked on this side of the fence, slinging mixed similes like they’re ice cream sundaes on Christmas.

See what I mean?

The point is that I’ve completed approximately 90 percent of a first draft! As rough as it is (and oh man, is it ever), it’s something I’m proud to have written. I think.

I don’t really remember what happened. November is mostly a blur. On top of my NaNoWriMo challenge, I also somehow managed to write well over 12,000 words on Hamlet. Hamlet! (See previous bloggys if you’re into the whole Shakespeare thing.) Also, all my kids got sick for a week on and off with a terrible, nasty, no good congestion and fever bug that also affected my wife and I. Our beloved cat Baby Gray passed away. That hit hard. And oh yeah, we hosted Friendsgiving. Good times and bad were had, and somehow in the middle of it all, the bulk of this new and exciting book emerged.

I mention this all not to brag (because as I’ve said, it is surely not yet quality work) but to give myself strength in the months and years ahead. As a selfish reminder to me: I do love writing. And when put to a creative task, I can actually make myself do it. My only rule — don’t obsess and edit in a first draft! Rewrites, changes, and fixes galore are coming, but this is truly the best way to go about it. Onward! Ho!

Breakdown! Go Ahead And Give It To Me!

Did you know that to write 50,000 words in a month you have to average 1,667 in a day? If you read my buddy Ron Dean’s post earlier this week, or had nearby access to the world’s largest abacus and nimble fingers, then yes, you did know that math checks out. Can I just tell you what it looks like, broadly speaking?

At the front end, writing 1,667 words a day for 30 days seems like a pretty daunting task. For me it did, anyway. But when I got motivated and rushed the charge, there wasn’t much I allowed to get in the way of achieving my goal. There were two or three days in there where I came away with a big fat goose egg. That only meant that I had to push myself even more on the others. And you know what? You want to hear the darndest thing? Once I started writing, it wasn’t even that hard to make the word counts (though making the actual words count will be a whole other story). Sure, I had to have my plot outlined to a respectable, linear timeline, but even with that semi-structure in place, and given that I’m a glutton for punishment and sort of a fly by his pants kinda writer at heart, I found my story veering off, sometimes more than was comfortable, into unchartered waters where I couldn’t even tell what was happening. Those imperfections will be cut, slashed, and revised. They will have to. The revision process is by and large my favorite part of writing. With the grind of a first draft behind you, you’re much freer to make the thing shine with your own magic wax. Eh, that’s weird.

Ho Ho! What Now, December?

I took the first three days off this month. I stayed away from my manuscript. Yesterday, without really meaning to, I dove back in and threw up the beginnings of what might be an ending. When that was going nowhere fast, I shuffled all the way back to the beginning and wrote a good portion of a new Chapter One. So yeah! I guess I’m back in it again! And as rough going as it is, the fear that I won’t be able to produce words is all but gone. NaNoWriMo reminded me that it’s possible to get your story down. Get it out of you and do the work cuz it’s not doing anyone else any good rooted deep down inside.

In the immortal words of 14 year old me:

Go now

Capture the silk butterfly

Godspeed