Larry M. Coleman

NaNoWriMo Day 14

You’re approaching the halfway point. This is the place where you either go, “Yay, I’m halfway there!” or you get depressed because you’ve been grinding away all this time and you still have that much grinding left to do. (If you’re feeling that way, that’s okay: Charles Lindbergh felt exactly the same way when he reached the middle of his history-making NY-Paris flight.)

NaNoWriMo math is easy: 50,000 ÷ 30 = 1667. Does that mean you have to write almost 1700 words a day? No. It just means you need to average that. You can work ahead, you can fall behind, you can do whatever it takes to get to 50,000 by November 30.

Okay, okay, but you’re wondering if people actually write 1667 words day after day. Is your progress “normal?” I don’t know what normal is, I just know what I’ve done, and I’ve yet to do the same thing the same way any of the four years I’ve hit 50k. Take a look, year by year:

Short year-by-year:

2020: For the first 15 days of the month, the gray line (words needed) and the green line (words written) overlap almost perfectly. I’d set myself a goal of 1700 words and wouldn’t shut the laptop until that was done. I dipped a bit, but never so far that a solid push at the end wouldn’t get it done.

2021: I’d already won once, so doing it again would be easy, right? You can see that attitude working until… until… until it didn’t. After stuffing myself over Thanksgiving, I had to stuff the page with words, which I did. Somehow.

2022: Supremely confident after two wins in a row, I started off slow. Once that gap really started getting big at the middle of the month, I scrambled to get in a third 50k in a row. I needed 6000 words on the last day of the month. I wrote 8000. Now that’s a panic curve.

2023: The first year I came in knowing exactly what I wanted to write. I was counting down the days until November when I could finally get started. I actually passed the 50,000 word mark on the 15th. I wrote so quickly that the scale on the 2023 graph is different from the other three.

All this shows is that there is no “normal” progress; there’s only your progress.

I’ll be as surprised as you are to see what the graph for 2024 looks like, because I’m going into it with zero planning, zero idea what I’m going to write, and not even a title. It’s really not a good idea (seriously, don’t take that as advice of any kind), but it’s a challenge to myself to see what I can do. I’ve actually had to actively discourage myself from thinking about it until 12:01 on November 1.

Notice something that the first two graphs have in common? Check out the next post. Keep on making progress!