My Experience with Nanowrimo

If you don’t know what Nanowrimo is, you can check it out here. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, a non-profit that helps writers succeed, and according to the website, has nearly 800,000 active members. Every November there is a 50,000-word challenge, and the organization has resources to help you along the way.

I work part-time and am a mother of three, one of whom is a toddler, and we had taken on the care of a second toddler for the month, so I didn’t have very high expectations for myself. I had no illusions that I would have the time to hit the 50,000-word mark by the end of November. But I love a good quest.

I roped a writer friend of mine into taking up the challenge with me and signed up for a nano account.

Now, when I began, I had already started a novel which was sitting at about 30,000 words, so I challenged myself to add another 50,000 words to it. In retrospect, that may have not been the best project to choose, because it was a complex plot, my characters were all over the place, and I had to spend a lot of time just planning how to weave all of the storylines together. It was not the kind of story that I could write in a straight shot.

Because I work and am a mother, most of my writing had to be done at night after the kids were asleep. That was difficult, especially because by that time of night my brain is fried, and it takes a lot of willpower to get myself into a creative headspace and stay there without falling asleep.

I persisted, forcing myself to at least put something down every single day, even if it was only a few paragraphs. Some days I didn’t get more than a couple hundred words down, but usually I got through at least one scene.

My most productive day was spent at the library, a nanowrimo “write-in”. There was a big open room with tables set up for writers, free coffee and snacks to keep you fueled. My husband held down the fort at home and shooed me out the door for the afternoon, probably hoping I’d meet someone else to talk to incessantly about my books.

I was the only one there. It was embarrassing at first, sitting in that big room by myself as the librarians flitted back and forth across the doorway, especially since it had taken so much willpower for me to even show up at the event in the first place. But I stayed. Alone in the quiet of the library, I got in almost 4,000 words in a few hours.

That may not seem like a lot, but I’m a slow writer. I edit as I write, and sometimes change a sentence three or four times before I move on. Part of the goal of nanowrimo is to get you to just write . . . keep going and edit later. I did not do that, but I was still happy with what I put on paper. I was really in the groove when the library closed. I could have written well into the night.

I left the library and sat in my car like a weirdo to finish up the scene I had been working on. The librarian smiled at me as she closed up and walked to her car, hopefully in a knowing, kindred-spirit kind of way, and not a concerned, what the heck is wrong with this lady kind of way. It was hard to tell.

At the end of the month I clocked in with 30,450 words. For me, that wasn’t bad. Maybe next year I will make it to 35,000. I averaged around a thousand words a day.

Overall, nanowrimo was a positive experience. It gave me a deadline to strive for, and I work well under that kind of pressure. It brought me out of my comfort zone. It was the first time I had written anywhere in public.

But the most important thing it did for me was help me establish a writing routine. Writing is fun. But sometimes it’s work, and you still need to do it. It pushed me to sit down with my computer and write, even when I was tired, cranky, and burned out. In the weeks following, I finished the first draft of my novel.  

Would I recommend nanowrimo? Heck yeah, give it a shot. What have you got to lose?