Why I Participated in National Novel Writing Month This Year

Over the past several years, every time November rolls around and I hear snippets of conversations that include the phrase ‘NaNoWriMo’ I have rolled my eyes and scoffed at the supposed writers who participate in such a gimmicky showdown. Surely a real writer does not need the imposed constraint of a daily minimum word count and periodic encouraging emails. Right?

            This year, however, I matured from that deluded point of view and realized that yes, actually, real writers need time constraints very much, as well as goals, friendly encouragement, and a community of like-minded supporters. And so with very low confidence I embarked on my very first NaNoWriMo in an attempt to write the first full-length novel I have written since I was seventeen.

            Apart from one script I wrote in a screenwriting class my sophomore year of college, I haven’t been able to write anything longer than a page since I was a teenager. I considered myself a writer since I was six and decided that’s what I was when I wrote a story about a baby seal that was almost ten pages long. So it’s been a sore spot for me that the older I’ve gotten, the less ‘inspired’ I’ve felt. Until this year.

            I finally learned that inspiration is not enough. What’s that quote: one-percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration. Yes, Thomas Edison said that, and he had to have been talking about writers! My problem, it seems, has been that whenever I start to feel like writing is becoming a burden, I stop, because I think it must just not be right. Actually, it probably means that when I was sixteen and wrote a 700+ page novel in less than a year, I was actually just ridiculously lucky and didn’t have many responsibilities.

So thank you, NaNoWriMo, for teaching me that hard work is what makes you who you are, not fleeting inspiration. I may not have gotten all 50,000 words in this November, but over the past four days I have been continuing to write diligently, and to tune out the voice of doubt that often tries to tell me ‘this is not good’ or ‘this is too hard’. It’s not really about whether it’s good, after all. My novel is for me, and too personal to ever publish. This has given me the bonus lesson that not everything I do in life has to have a higher purpose. Sometimes, you just do things because you know they’ll make you happy.

I am pretty sure than I’ll have a finished novel by the end of 2015, but even if for some reason I don’t, I’m not going to quit until it’s finished. This time, I am going to succeed in finishing a story.