50,000 Freaking Words

When I told my boyfriend I was thinking about doing NaNoRiMo, he started laughing uncontrollably.

“NaNo what?” he asked between chuckles, eyebrows raised.

If you’ve never heard of this phenomenon, it’s short for National Novel Writing Month, and it’s when writers write 50,000 words during the month of November. Yep, that’s right. 50,000 freaking words. That’s 1666 words a day, 1923 if you don’t write on Sundays, which I didn’t when I participated in 2017. For some writers, that’s par for the course, but for a lot of us (read: me), that’s rough. Upwards of two hours of writing per day (on top of working, eating, sleeping, exercising, socializing, and in my case, making homemade chocolates because that’s what my family does in November).

It’s kind of sucky, to be honest. But there are upsides such as these ones:

· NaNo helped me prioritize writing in a way that is often hard because it’s not my full-time job, I don’t get paid for it, no one besides me really cares if I do it—you get the picture. NaNo made me put writing on top priority because I’d set a goal and I wanted to reach it.

· I participated with hundreds (thousands?) of other people, and I got to put my progress in the NaNoRiMo website and see how I and everyone else was coming along. The comradery was cool.

· I wrote 50,000 words in a month. It felt pretty awesome to accomplish that!

Those pros made it worth it to do NaNo at least once. However, as I looked at doing it again this year, the cons of my experience weighed in:

· After I finished my 50,000-word manuscript, a Little Mermaid retelling about Ariel getting legs to assassinate Eric, I haven’t looked at it. Not once.

· The reason I haven’t looked at the draft, even though I really love that story idea, is that my NaNo draft was complete garbage. Every first draft sucks, but this one feels so irredeemable that when I do sit down to revamp the story, I’m not even sure if I’ll look at that version.

· While I admit some of the draft’s crappiness had to do with lack of story plotting on my part—I decided to do NaNo last-minute in 2017—it also had to do with how stressed I was while writing it. 1923 words a day is no joke, and I’d get so freaked out about finishing my daily quota that I’d start writing gibberish just to keep my fingers typing so that I wouldn’t waste any of my precious (and limited) writing time.

So that was the good and the bad of NaNo for me. Thinking about it this year, I wanted to participate for the sake of the goal, but I didn’t want the extreme stress, and I wanted to end up with a usable draft.

My solution? Spread NaNo over three months to write 50,000 words by the end of the year. I factored out days I knew I wouldn’t write, like Sundays, Christmas, and the week I’ll be on a cruise. My goal is 877 words a day, 6 days a week, until the end of the year.

I’ve been going strong for two weeks! Part of me feels a little weak sauce for not doing the traditional NaNo, but most of me (especially the part that controls my mental health) is really happy.

Thanks for reading about my goal! Good luck to you if you’re doing NaNoRiMo come November, and if you’re not, good luck with whatever your current goal is.

Bonus: want to know the story I’m writing for my modified NaNo? Well now, let me just present you with my pitch . . .

18-year-old Tiff never meant to friendzone Rob—she just wasn’t ready for it when he tried to kiss her at the start of the summer. Now a cross-country road trip is her last chance to tell him how she really feels before their paths diverge for college. However, her carefully laid plan to fix things with him is rudely disrupted when her cute, spontaneous cousin ends up on the road trip and goes after Rob too.

Woo! Go writing!