NaNoWriMo ~ Is it helpful?
I’ve never done NaNoWriMo before this year. Never really felt the need to.
I don’t have trouble motivating myself to write. When I have spare time, I write, or I’m working on editing something that I have written before, working on queries or something related to writing. I’m also a fairly quick writer, so the number goal wasn’t something that particularly interested me. I wrote as fast as I could when I had time to write.
This year a writing group that I’m a part of decided to enter NaNo as a group. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time for me.
I have a book coming out next Fall that is in developmental edits, I have a short story—my first successful short story attempt—that I’m prepping to submit to a contest, a book just out of beta feedback that I am editing to submit to agents, and I’ll be traveling all over Illinois for two weeks out of the month.
But everyone was doing it, and I’m actively trying to get more involved in the Nashville writing community and make more writing friends.
At this point, some of you may be asking yourselves, “Wait, what the hell is NaNoWriMo anyway?” It’s a writing ‘contest’ held every November. It’s free and the goal is to get to 50,000 words by the end of the month. That translates to approximately 1,667 words a day. This is not a big deal for me in general, but when I’m editing and working on the other stuff, the straight writing tends to take a back seat. And you never know what you’re going to be able to accomplish of your personal goals when you’re traveling and visiting folks.
What happens if you don’t get to your 50,000 word goal?
Nothing really. There are some ‘parties’ and gatherings if you do finish from what I’ve been told, but it’s free to sign up and free to participate, so it’s not like you’ll lose money or be penalized in any way if you don’t make it to 50,000. However, I’m very competitive with myself, and I knew that if I signed up, I would push myself to make it to that 50,000 come hell or high water. And I am still fairly certain that this isn’t healthy.
Our group leader posted several ‘tips and tricks’ to help increase the word count. Here are some of them:
Don’t delete words, use the strikethrough feature instead, or cut them and paste them down at the bottom of your document beneath a line of asterisks or something. Technically you did write them.
Count new words as you edit by using the ‘Track Changes’ feature and adding them all up.
If you get writer's block, journal it out. You may come up with something that ends up in your story, and your journal will count toward your word count.
None of these are appealing to me and I’m not doing them.
They all add on work to me and for me it’s more important to have fun writing and get the best story that I can down than to make the—at the end of the day, arbitrary—goal of 50,000 words.
At this point, some of you may be asking, “So does this mean you’re doing it? Even with everything you have going on? This seems unwise.”
Yes, yes, and yes.
I’ve decided to opt into the group NaNo spreadsheet where I plop my word count into an Excel column at the end of every day to be added up with all the rest. I have not yet signed up for the global NaNo competition. Apparently this is something that you can do at any point in the process should I feel like I’m making enough progress.
I’ve decided that this will be a good chance for me to deal with my competitive tendencies and learn to let things go and prioritize. I have already turned in my edits for Ghost Tamer (a week early) to my editor and the next round won’t start until the end of the month. My short story is in a good place to submit in a few days, and I’ll make time to finish the edits on my other piece and start getting it out to submission.
Maybe I’ll even count the words in my query letter toward my daily goal. You’d better believe this blog post is going to count.
At the very least, it is interesting to see how many words I actually do write a day. This is something I never really paid much attention to before. I was more concerned with overall word count and if I had figured out how the hell the story was going to end. And there are some fun things about it already.
The group has started daily writing meetings on Zoom. If you’re available, you log on and chat for a few moments and then everyone puts themselves on mute and writes for a time. I’m writing this blog in the very first one I’ve been able to attend. It’s kind of nice and there’s a community feel to the writing, which I like. As it is, I’m only able to attend half of this meeting and will have completed my entire post.
The meetings are also good at honing focus—and least this first one is—as I tend to be someone who will click over to check my email and read dumb articles if I get stuck while I’m writing, rather than keep my thoughts with the words. This is something I usually do unconsciously. When I catch myself, I will try and self-correct, but there’s a different vibe when you’re “sitting in a room” so to speak with other writers who are on your “team” trying to make that goal.
I’m not sure yet if I will join the official NaNoWriMo contest, but at the end of the month, I’ll update and let you know what I thought of the entire experience, and whether or not I was able to make it to the 50,000 word goal. And whether those words were, in fact, any good.