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NaNoWriMo Diaries: A Noveling Experience
story: Kelly McKewin
photography: Lydia Hanicak
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Every year, novelists around the world participate in National Novel Writing Month during November. I’ve been participating in the challenge since 2012. This is the story of my 2017 experience.
It was a mistake to post something on Snapchat about National Novel Writing Month. Most people probably clicked through my story without a second glance, but I should have known there was no escaping the questions of my literary-minded friends, like Annalisa.
“You still haven’t let me read the last novel,” Annalisa messaged me back. “When is that going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “You know I wrote that at the beginning of sophomore year. If I read it now, it’d be crap.”
“But I still want to read it.”
“Maybe I’ll edit it over winter break and try to do something with it then,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, even though she can’t see me through the phone.
“That would be cool! I could help you edit it if you wanted, too!” Annalisa replied.
“Yeah, that would be awesome,” I messaged back, knowing full well that the novel I wrote when I was
fifteen, “War Struck: The First Reflection,” was never going to see the light of day again. It could sit on my desk, hiding away in an old binder in my bedroom back home, for the rest of my life and I wouldn’t care. In fact, I’d be perfectly happy with that.
I didn’t always have that mentality. Naturally, when I was 15, that novel was going to be on the next Harry Potter and make me a million dollars. But things change: one day I looked at it, and I realized my writing had matured to a point where fixing it just didn’t seem worth it. It would be easier to write a new novel, which is what I’ve been struggling to do since then. Starting novels is the easy part. I had five or six going at the start of this November alone. It’s the act of finishing a novel that I haven’t been able to do since I’ve been 15.
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NaNoWriMo, shorthand for National Novel Writing
Month, takes place each November, in which aspiring novelists around the world attempt to write 50,000 words in a month. It’s run online by a nonprofit organization, with nearly half a million people getting involved every year. The organization also runs smaller events in April and July, called Camp NaNoWriMo.
My own involvement with NaNo began in November of 2012, as a freshman in high school. Though I didn’t finish my novel that year, I wrote the required amount every day after school, and by midnight on November 30 that year, I’d successfully written 50,435 words in a month. I had never been more proud of myself.
The book’s title, ironically, was “Things That Go Nowhere and My Life’s Other Failures.” Of everything I remember about the novel, the title is the only thing I regret. It seems that calling my first ever attempt at NaNoWriMo a failure in the title did not set me up for future success.
November 2012 was the first and only time that I ever won NaNoWriMo. I’ve participated in NaNo’s and Camp NaNo’s on and off since then, but have never managed to hit that 50k benchmark. Most of the time, I give up anywhere between 10,000 and 25,000 words. In short, my failed NaNo attempts have become a long trail of things that are going nowhere.
Even “War Struck,” while complete, has gone nowhere since I’ve written it. I completed it in 2013, as part of two unsuccessful attempts to win NaNoWriMo events. While I never hit 50,000 words in a month, I wrote about half of the book in July that year, another half of it in November, and then rounded out the few final thousand words during winter break, just before New Year’s.
I was thrilled to have finished it. Holding the actual pages of my novel in my hands, after spending so much time on it, was a feeling like no other. The sense of accomplishment, of pride, was more profound than any I’d felt before. There had been no homework assignment or school project that could compare to the feeling of finishing a novel, motivated only by my own excitement.
I put “War Struck” into an old binder that I found at home, relishing the feeling of flicking through the pages with my fingers, and put it up on the bookshelf above my bed. I decided to come back to the book in a few weeks to edit it. But, as life got in the way, a few weeks turned into a few months which turned into almost a year.
The writing, all that time later, was not as good as I’d built it up in my head to be. There were plot holes and cringe-worthy similes, important details missing and irrelevant details everywhere. Slowly, I gave up on it. The binder moved from my bookshelf to a spot on my desk, and was slowly overrun by a layer of dust, notebooks and papers until I had practically forgotten about it.
I reasoned with myself, telling myself it was okay. It had been my first try, and now that I’d proved I could do it, I could easily write another novel, one that was worthy of my time in the editing process.
That novel was never written.
I had excuses: junior year, I was busy with AP classes. Senior year, I was busy with AP classes and college applications. During the summer, I had work. When college started, I had to get used to college. I told myself I had no motivation during the “off” months of NaNo, and during the NaNo months, 10,000 or 20,000 words was all I could manage. I started many novels in those four years, but never finished any. At one point, during 2016, I decided not to participate in NaNo at all, convinced by my track record that I couldn’t do it.
But by spring 2017, I was itching to write creatively again. I had found that college, surprisingly, offered me more time to sneak in words throughout the day than high school had. In April, I decided to give Camp NaNoWriMo another go.
Of course, I failed. But, I failed with 31,000 words, instead of my usual, much-lower word counts. I had a similar experience in July, when I attempted my second Camp NaNo of the year. After that, I set my sights on November: I was slowly getting better, and this time, during the “real” NaNo event of the year, I’d find a way to finally finish a novel.
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On October 31, I stayed up late, papers with small jotted notes surrounding me on my bed, my laptop opened to four different Google Documents I’d started over the course of the last month. I had yet to decide on a plot. Coming up with novel ideas is far, far easier than writing novels, so I had quite a few story ideas on my mind, but it felt like a momentous decision to pick just one. These were the characters I was going to be spending the next month and hopefully longer, with, and I wanted to make sure their story was one I wanted to tell. Which story was the right story, the one that I was supposed to be telling at this point in time?
I had four options, the way I saw it:
One, I could continue the story I’d started back in April, about a magic inn that acted as a gateway between a fantasy world and reality. However, it had been a while since I’d thought about it, so some of the excitement was lost, and as I’d already had 31 thousand words written, I felt like it would be “cheating” to keep going with it during this NaNo. This NaNo was my return; I wanted to win with a brand new story, not a continuation of one.
Two, I could do a modern-day fairy tale retelling, set in a pseudo-Oxford and focused on a conspiracy between the three little pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and a few other classic characters to take down all wolves in order to rule the government. This plot, too, had its issues: the characters weren’t fleshed out yet, and the storyline was just as confusing in my head as it looked when I tried to plan it on paper.
Three, I could do a basic fantasy story, about a mailman sent on a quest in a fantasy world. This plot wasn’t special, and didn’t particularly stand out in my mind, but it would be easy and familiar. I was used to attempting fantasy stories about people on quests.
Four, my last option, was the one I felt the strongest about. It wouldn’t be a fantasy. The plot would focus on a girl and her grandparents, where the main character would learn about their family recipes and the memories associated with them, in order to come to some conclusions about her own life. I hadn’t been able to get this idea out of my head for weeks, and I felt more excited about it that any of the others, but I was also scared. To pull off this kind of novel, it would have to be poignant and reveal some kind of deeper truth about life, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tackle that.
I closed up my laptop around midnight, and put away my collection of papers. It was November 1, but I’d officially start writing in the morning. I still hadn’t settled on a plot, but I decided to sit down at my laptop the next morning, and start writing. Whatever plot I wrote about would be the one I would stick with for the rest of the month.
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November 1. It was morning, three hours before I had to get to class, and there was no immediately pressing homework to do. I sat in front of my laptop screen, staring, staring, staring. I still hadn’t decided what to write, but the excitement to start NaNo and get going on this month-long project was intense, so I took a deep breath, and started typing.
What I ended up writing about surprised even me. The fear of writing about option four had won over my excitement, so I’d started with option three instead, and spent most of the day discussing how the mailman had plodded along a trail to reach a village. Towards the end of the day, however, I had him run into Darby, the main character from option four, and her grandparents. I was too afraid to write her story, but I couldn’t get her out of my head, and had to somehow include her in this novel.
I sent a message to an online writing buddy at the end of the day, telling her about my first day of writing.
“I don’t really know what my main character is going to be doing right now, or really much about him in general,” I wrote. “But I have a side character with a sassy grandma and I’m in love with the two of them.”
I didn’t exactly love Lewis, my main character, as he was a bit of a bore to me. I’d put in a day’s worth of work to him though, and I figured if I just kept going, things would get better. I could flesh out his personality more, and find a plot that worked with him. And in the meantime, I still had Darby, the side character, to keep me excited about the novel.
I was about 300 words short of my word count goal for the day, when Nick texted me:
I texted him back, Sure, and then finished the paragraph I was working on before saving my novel and closing my laptop, knowing that they were probably only a few minutes away. It’s always frustrating to be interrupted when I get into the flow of writing. I’d been on a roll that day, writing about 1,500 words in one sitting, but falling short by 300 words wasn’t too bad. I could easily get those last words in before I went to bed.
A couple minutes later, I was sitting in the back of Nick’s dad’s car, waiting at the long light at Patterson so his dad could take us back to his dorm.
“What have you been you been up to the last couple hours?” Nick asked.
“Oh, nothing really,” I said. “Just kind of hanging around.”
“Were you writing again?” he asked, knowing that I spent most of my free time on Saturdays holed up Amos or my dorm with my laptop.
“Yeah, I was,” I said, wishing he hadn’t asked.
“Kelly is writing a book,” Nick said, turning to look at his dad. “She’s trying to do it in a month, too.”
“Oh really? What’s it about?” Brian asked.
“I don’t know, she won’t let me read any of it,” Nick said.
The light finally changed, and we turned onto Spring Street. Brian looked up, and we made eye contact through the rearview mirror. I knew he was expecting some kind of answer, and the familiar mix of panic and dread that always comes with that question welled up inside me.
“I don’t really know. It’s just, like, a book,” I said.
“Well, what genre is it?” he asked.
“I, um, I don’t know,” I said, knowing before I even said the words that my answer sounded stupid. I had to know what the book was about; it was my book.
We pulled up outside Nick’s hall, and Brian got out of the car to help him grab a few bags from the trunk.
“I’ll see you in a couple weeks for Thanksgiving,” he said to Nick, before turning to me. “Good luck with your book, whatever it’s about. I would love to hear more about it.”
Brian gets back into the car and drives off, while Nick and I head inside and up the stairs to his room. My face was burning with the leftover embarrassment of not being able to answer a simple question about the book. Why, why, why did this topic always get brought up?
What’s your novel about? It had to be the worst question in the world.
----
Sharing fictional writing has never come naturally to me. I’ve always been innately private about it. In elementary school, I would hide short stories I wrote in a locked briefcase I’d taken from a neighbor’s garage sale. In middle school, I would forge my parent’s signatures on my 7th and 8th grade creative writing portfolios, pretending I had shown it to them. The feeling has only intensified over the years, but finding the source of that fear has remained a struggle.
On the surface, I often tell myself it’s merely inconvenient to share it. My mom, always one to over-analyze things, is the type of person who would pester me with questions like “Is this character based on me? Is this representative of your own life? Is this actually how you feel about X or Y?” I tell myself it would be tedious to go through her questions, constantly telling her no, only to have her persist more, or have other members of my family join in on the questioning. I tell myself it’s not worth sharing the story, because they wouldn’t see the story for what it is.
You’d all get too caught up trying to figure out if I’m writing about myself, when there’s nothing related to real life in this book. That is the answer I most often give when I tell family and friends I don’t want them to read my work. Often times, I even convince myself that this is the real reason I’m so secretive with my work.
The problem is, when I’m willing to admit it to myself, there is real life in my work. Some settings and scenarios, and nearly every character, have a small piece of myself inside them. I’m not autobiographical in my work, nor do I self-insert myself into the books I write. But it’s impossible to create characters— characters that I want to come across as living, breathing people on the page—without inserting human traits and flaws and desires and experiences into them. And often times, the easiest way to begin creating a character is to take a trait, flaw, desire, or experience that I’m familiar with, and build it up around other things, until I’ve got a well-rounded character. Some end up more similar to me than others, but there is a small piece of myself, something I identify with, in each and every one.
And that is the real reason as to why it’s so hard to show other people my writing, or even to discuss it. It’s likely that most people, even those I’m close to, wouldn’t recognize the bits of myself found in many of my characters, but there’s a nagging fear that they will. My characters, feel not only like extensions of myself, but like people who would understand me completely if they existed in real life. There’s a deep, personal connection that I feel to them and to their stories, and sharing that is terrifying. Divulging even the smallest bit of information about a character or what’s going on with them feels like divulging a very personal secret or intimate thought, and I haven’t quite overcome that fear or broken that barrier yet with the people in my life.
----
A little over a week into NaNo, I was practically 2,000 words ahead. And yet, I wasn’t completely invested in my main character or my plot. Darby and the other characters I’d created for the cooking story seemed to be living on the page, but they were side characters in this novel. The mailman and the other residents of the fantasy world were the people I was supposed to be writing about.
I tried telling myself that I would start to get a better feel for Lewis’s personality the more I wrote about him, but in the back of my mind, I knew I was lying to myself. It had been over a week already that I’d been writing about Lewis the mailman, and I hadn’t started to care about him at all the way that a reader should, never mind care about him in the way that I as the author should have. Hitting my daily word count had steadily been getting harder and harder, even though I was ahead. I sometimes opened my laptop and just stared at the screen, reading over the last paragraphs that I’d written, resentful of the fact that I was going to have to spend the next hours of writing talking about Lewis. I didn’t care about him as a character, and I didn’t care about his quest. The novel was becoming a chore to write.
I wanted to keep going, but something in my novel needed to change. I just hadn’t figured it out yet.
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I clearly couldn’t manage talking about my writing with people I was close to, like Nick or Annalisa or even my mom. But I still wanted people to discuss my writing with, so I decided to branch out.
I tried posting in the Oxford NaNoWriMo forum, as the site showed 37 people registered as novelists in the city, but had little success on that front: one girl, whose word count status showed that she wasn’t writing a novel, directed me to Association of Creative Writers on campus, saying they were going to be planning weekly write-in events outside of their normal club hours, likely on Saturday mornings at Starbucks, as some of their members participated in NaNoWriMo.
Saturday morning came, and I happily packed up my laptop, plugged my headphones in, and walked from my dorm towards Maplestreet Station. I was still feeling lackluster about my novel and was confused about what I should do to get myself excited about it again, but I hoped talking it over with someone could help me resolve my problem. At the very least, a block of a few hours dedicated entirely to writing, while surrounded by other novelists hard at work, could be the exact thing that I needed to work through it on my own.
I arrived at the Starbucks about five minutes early, got in line, and ordered a cup of tea. I looked around while I waited for it to be ready. The Starbucks was relatively empty: there were a few parents and teenagers waiting around me that were clearly on a campus tour, or about to go on one, based on the red Miami bags they held. One girl was sitting in the corner with a huge textbook and a notebook out. There was a group of five people sitting around a table that I supposed could be novelists for a moment, but they were getting ready to leave.
It seemed no one from the ACW or NaNoWriMo had shown up yet, but that was okay. I was five minutes early, and it was a Saturday morning. They might just be running late.
I got my tea and sat down at a table near an outlet so I could plug my laptop in. I was on the look-out for the first person to show up that looked like a novelist.
I waited. And waited. And waited a little longer.
No one ever came. The Starbucks stayed busy, but while there were plenty of sorority girls, parents from the campus tour, tired-looking students scrolling through their phones, and people getting their coffee to-go, I didn’t see anyone come into the Starbucks, pull out a laptop, and open up a Word document or the NaNoWriMo site, or even anyone who came in with a pen and paper to write by hand. Eventually, I gave up hope that anyone was coming.
However, I still had an almost-full cup of tea, a coveted spot by a power outlet, and many problems to work out with my novel. Even if no one else was there, I could spend the next few hours having a write-in for one.
----
The beginnings of novels are so easy. The idea is new and shiny and full of potential, and writing a few thousand words a day for a week or two feels like no problem when the excitement is there. The problem always starts in the middle. More words have to be written, plot holes have to be fixed, and writing starts to feel like work. It’s so much easier to just scrape the words I’ve written and start anew with a different idea. Because of course, I’m always able to delude myself into believing the new idea will be the one that I finally finish.
This is what I thought about as I sat in the bustling Maplestreet Starbucks, sipping my mint tea. I scrolled aimlessly up and down my current draft, reading bits and pieces of the work.
I have written 18,997 words in the last ten days, but I’m just not excited anymore. There’s no way I can feign excitement or force myself to write this story for the next twenty days. Even if I did, and I hit 50,000 words like I was supposed to, I knew there was no way I could then force myself to finish the story if it wasn’t done yet. And that was the goal here: winning NaNoWriMo was first and foremost in my mind, but a complete novel was the only thing that would bring me true satisfaction.
And that’s when I hit delete.
Of course, I saved everything first. You don’t write 19,000 words of a novel and just delete it without backing it up somewhere first, even if you do hate the draft. But after I’d backed it up, I deleted everything, and started over with a blank document. Zero words, no plot, nothing written, but ten days into the month.
It was terrifying to see that blank screen. It was even more terrifying to realize that I’d just succumbed to everything that had made me abandon novels in the past: when I got to around 20,000 words in a draft, I stopped being excited and wanted to give up. I could very well have the same thing happen to me with whatever new novel I was about to start writing, and then I’d still be in my continuous loop of started-butnever-finished novels.
The fear, however, while paralyzing for a few moments, gave way to a new sense of determination. I’d already made the choice to give up on this novel, and the only thing that could stop me from being so afraid of the blank page, and of giving up on this next attempt, was to write and then not give up when I hit the 20,000 word mark.
And so I started writing.
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While the NaNoWriMo website defines “winning” as writing 50,000 words of a new novel in one month, because of the self-driven nature of the challenge, “winning” can sometimes be left open to interpretation. I was tempted to take an alternative frame of mind when it came to winning after deleting my novel. I could continue on with the pace that I’d been writing and still reach 50,000 by the end of the month. Of course, I’d only end up with 31,000 words of a new story that I was excited about, and I’d be a long way away from the end of the novel on November 30, but I could still say I’d won NaNoWriMo.
That, however, was too easy.
I wanted to be a traditionalist about the contest: I was going to write 50,000 words of a single, new novel before November 30, even if I was close to 20,000 words behind now.
That week was a frenzy of writing. I knew it was going to take a while to catch up, and that it wouldn’t happen in an afternoon, but I still had to write as much as I could, whenever I could.
I was frantic. I spent Sunday afternoon that week doing nothing but writing, using up all the time I usually put towards getting ahead on homework for the week. My eyes hurt and my wrists were sore by the end of the day, but I’d written 5,000 words, and was well on my way.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday went much the same way: I took shorter showers in the morning to give me an extra ten minutes to write before I had to leave for class, squeezed in writing between classes, during class whenever I was able to pull my laptop out, and before meals if I was waiting for someone to meet me for lunch in a dining hall. Homework was put off until the very last minute, as only a looming Canvas deadline could make me forget my novel to do an assignment. I was writing anywhere from three to five thousand words a day, and I’d soon made up enough ground that I wasn’t worried about not making the 50,000 word goal anymore.
I was no longer worried about hitting the dreaded 20,000 mark and giving up, either. I had deleted my entire novel on November 11, but by November 17, I was at 25,000 words, and still enthusiastic. I’d made a decision that I probably should have made at the beginning of the month: I was writing the story I really wanted to write.
My story seemed to be writing itself. I knew my characters well, better than I’d ever figured out Lewis, and their reactions to each scenario that was sprung on them or to the new characters I would have them encounter all felt natural. They were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. I’d been unsure about whether I was ready to tackle a novel that dealt with real life and not fantasy, and while I was still unsure of whether I was successfully tackling that kind of novel, I was writing it, and that was what mattered.
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My mind is constantly churning, thinking of new concepts for novels, tinkering with old story ideas and creating characters in my head. In some ways, it feels as if I never grew up: the part of my brain that created imaginary friends and make-believe games for my stuffed animals when I was six years old simply morphed into an imagination ripe for creating fictional stories. Fueled, too, by reading book after book, it’s no wonder that part of my mind doesn’t turn off.
As such, I don’t exactly know where the concept or the characters for my novel came from. Most of them had been floating around in my head for some time, slowly being developed, and during some daydream or another, it just clicked that certain characters would work well together in a story. Thus, I somehow arrived at the idea for Darby’s story.
It was a heavier concept that I’d wanted to take on at the beginning of the month. With so much of the story based on real life, I had to insert more of myself into these characters and scenarios than I ever had before, and whenever I thought about sharing the story with someone, as I know I’ll have to if I want anything to come of it, it utterly terrified me.
And yet, I was still happy I was writing it. This was the story I had been itching to tell, and I was going to tell it, no matter how scary the thought of being so honest in my writing was.
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The week of Thanksgiving, my writing slowed down to a much more relaxed pace. Five thousand word days were not going to happen in between all the family time and festivities.
I still wrote, though. I had a strange feeling of nostalgia each time I sat down to write, as I was back in my childhood bedroom, sitting on the same bed or at the same desk where I wrote “War Struck” and where I first decided to try NaNoWriMo in 2012. It was strangely encouraging: I had been so eager to write back then, and here I was, still eager to do the same thing.
There were challenges in writing over Thanksgiving.
Each time I’d try to sneak off to write for part of an afternoon, the second my bedroom door was closed, my mom was there, knocking on it and then opening it before I’d had a chance to answer.
“What are you doing?” she asked, the first time this occurred.
“I’m writing,” I said, not looking up from the keyboard.
“What are you even writing? You said you don’t have homework,” Mom said.
I had told her I finished all my homework for the weekend. As I sat there, I wished I would have lied about that.
“I’m writing part of my novel,” I said. “It’s National Novel Writing Month.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “You should come downstairs and watch Windy City Live with me if you’re not doing much. They said Chance the Rapper might be on.”
She shut the door and left to go downstairs, while I kept typing, knowing I only had another 10 or 15 minutes before she’d be back upstairs again, asking me what I was doing.
My mother, like most of my family, has never been actively supportive of my noveling, though she hasn’t discouraged it either. I’m of the impression that she thinks there’s nothing actually there to support. I’ve never let anyone in my family read a single word I’ve written creatively.
In 2013, after I proudly announced that I’d written a novel, there was a decent amount of interest from my parents, a few uncles and aunts, and even my grandmother to read “War Struck,” but I told them all they’d have to wait until at least the second draft. I had a few questions about it in the months following, but as more time passed, and a second draft never appeared, everyone stopped asking about it, and it seemed to fade from their minds completely.
I didn’t talk about writing novels with anyone after that, other than short, vague conversations with my parents during high school, when they’d ask what I was doing while I was writing, and I’d tell them I was writing a novel as part of NaNoWriMo. They didn’t pry beyond that, likely because they knew I wouldn’t tell them anything more, let alone let them read my work.
My parents have no idea what my relationship with creative writing has been like over the last five years: as far as they know, I might have written fifty novels that I’m keeping hidden from them, though more likely than not, they probably think I haven’t written anything at all, since they’ve never seen it.
I’ve showed my parents every journalistic piece that I’ve ever written: every feature for MQ, every news article in my high school paper, even the interview I conducted with my friend’s mom in third grade for a class assignment. But creative writing? They’ve never read a word.
I avoid talking about my novel with anyone else in the family that week. I get asked a lot at Thanksgiving what I’ve been up to lately, and while I want to mention the novel, as it’s been the only thing I’ve been up to lately, I don’t.
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When I get back to school on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, there are four days left of NaNoWriMo, and I am at just over 42,000 words. The contest goal is within reach, but I’m mostly just exhausted. Four weeks of focusing on nothing but writing a novel, while ignoring homework, is mentally draining.
A very tiny part of me feels like giving up, but not on the novel, just on NaNoWriMo. I still love the book; I just want to slow down with the word count, especially with finals getting ever-closer.
Nevertheless, I keep going. After 26 days, deleting a novel and starting over, it would be pointless now to stop, when I’m so close to winning.
-----
The last few days are tedious. I update my word count on the NaNo website frequently, eager to see the progress bar inch along, even if it barely moves when I input that I’ve written only 100 or 200 words in a sitting. I’m still interested in the novel, but writing at breakneck speed for weeks has left me exhausted.
Schoolwork has started to worry me, too. Finals are only two weeks away, and with all the energy I’ve spent on NaNo in the last month, there’s one or two classes I haven’t quite put enough effort into lately. There’s a website I have to code, a video essay I have yet to compose, and a news package due soon. These things are in the back of my mind, calling me to work on them, but it’s difficult to do when so much mental energy is expended on another project.
But even with the threat of grades on the horizon, this project, this novel, is the one that still feels most important. I’ve had these characters in my mind for ages, and writing about them is both cathartic and fulfilling. I’ve needed to put a story on paper, a full story, and that’s exactly what’s been done this past month.
I keep writing. Eight thousand words in four days should be nothing after what I’ve done this month.
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I type the 50 thousandth word of my novel, “feathers,” while in the Amos music library on Thursday afternoon before I head to class. I get excited immediately, and validate my word count on the NaNoWriMo website.
The little status bar under my username changes from blue to purple, and the word WINNER! pops up in it in all caps. I’m directed to a page on the website with a short video clip of the NaNoWriMo directors saying congratulations, and I smile, feeling a small surge of pride in my accomplishment. I wrote 50,000 words in 19 days, and I was still invested in this novel. This really might be the next one I finish.
I don’t outwardly celebrate my win, and instead click out of the NaNoWriMo page and turn back to my novel. I still have time before my class starts, and I can hopefully write another thousand words before I have to leave. Winning NaNoWriMo is great, but I know from past experience that nothing will measure up to the feeling of having a complete first draft.
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Overall, I finished NaNoWriMo with a total of 51,121 words of my new novel, which I’ve tentatively titled “The Recipe Book.” Though it took me far longer than I wanted to finish the novel completely, I finally managed it this past summer, after months of on-and-off writing.
I won’t be doing anything with the novel for a while—I still firmly believe in distancing oneself from a piece of writing for a while before looking at it again, especially a piece that’s taken so much energy. But as it’s October, I’m gearing up for this year’s NaNoWriMo contest once again, and I’m more confident than ever in my ability to tackle this challenge. I analyzed my writing and writing process more thoroughly than ever before when I wrote this piece last year, and I plan to move into this November with all the lessons I took away from the experience: the importance of telling the story I need to tell, creating real characters, and most importantly, writing candidly and honestly about those characters, even if I have to admit they’re an extension of myself.
