NaNoWriMo Day 1
Today is the youngest you’ll ever be.
So many people want to write a novel, and almost all of them run out of days before they do that. They think there’s tomorrow, then tomorrow, then tomorrow. There is, until one of those tomorrows brings the undertaker.
If you want to write a book, you can, of course, pick any day of the year to start. You can finish whenever you like. That’s totally an option, and it fails almost all the time. One of the best ways to not fail is to give yourself a definite start date, a goal, and a time limit. Let’s say, oh, November 1 with a time limit of 30 days to write 50,000 words.
It’s been done: it’s called NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. Plenty of people have accomplished it, some (like me) multiple times, so it’s a doable goal. It’s an insane goal (averaging 1700 words a day every day for a month straight deserves that adjective), but it’s a doable insanity.
And why shouldn’t you? You have just as much of a right to write a novel as anyone else.
There may be some times when you feel like Thalfi, the character from Norse mythology who runs faster than any human can, then finally loses a race badly. He finds out the next day that he was racing against thought, which is faster than any of us will ever be. Those are fun days, and even just a handful of them can make the whole month worthwhile.
Then there will be times when you feel like a rock: dense, unmoving, and unproductive. That’s normal every once in a while. Pouring out words is mentally exhausting. Some days it just won’t be there, and that’s something you can expect and live with as long as “some days” don’t become “every day.” Some days will be duds; write through them and do what it takes to get to the end.
Because what’s most valuable about NaNoWriMo isn’t the novel you’ll have at the end, it’s the fact that you set a high bar for yourself—higher than most people would choose to do—and then cleared it. When you finish your novel, you’ll have learned to finish a novel. And that you can finish hard things. Even if you only do it once, and even if no one (maybe even yourself) ever reads that novel again, you will have still learned something incredibly important and useful. Not craft or style or technique (although you’ll learn so much of that along the way), but that you can do the things you don’t think you can do.
The novel won’t be great—no first draft is, even ones written in a year instead of a month. But it will be yours, and that’s something no one can take away from you.
So get ready to sit down on November 1st and take yourself for a ride you’ll never forget!
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