NaNoWriMo Day 17
Writing a book is like raising a child: you do it through love and care and attention. You try to give it the best parts of you as you watch it grow. It will ignore some of your advice and sometimes take some that you really wish it hadn’t. It will eventually develop into its own personality and find its way in the world. With luck, it’s one that’s higher than you could have ever dreamed for it.
But there’s one important way the two are different: you have to take care of a child every day, but you don’t have to write every single day.
If you need to take a day off to pause and take a breath, that’s okay. It’s not a catastrophe. Writing is hard work. It’s tiring. It saps the energy from your brain, and since your brain runs your body, it makes you physically tired. Since writing can feel like play sometimes, it’s easy to underestimate how drained you are because it’s insidious: you don’t feel like you’ve done anything hard and the same organ that is supposed to figure out whether you’re getting impaired through fatigue is also the same one that’s fatigued and therefore in no position to judge.
If you can’t do it every day for a month straight, that’s fine, normal, and even healthy. You don’t have to write every single day to win NaNoWriMo. In fact, if you look at my own graphs during my NaNoWriMo completions, in none of them did I write every day of the month. Here’s a quick chart of how many words you need to average if you take up to 1/3 of the month off:
| Days off | Words per day |
| 0 | 1667 |
| 1 | 1725 |
| 2 | 1786 |
| 3 | 1852 |
| 4 | 1924 |
| 5 | 2000 |
| 6 | 2084 |
| 7 | 2174 |
| 8 | 2273 |
| 9 | 2381 |
| 10 | 2500 |
You can take a day off every week and still have to average less than 2000 words per day. You can even take every weekend off and average less than 2300 words per day. Chris Baty in No Plot? No Problem! actually schedules in an off day every weekend, and you should make sure you give yourself at least one day off per week, too.
While these are still ambitious numbers, you don’t have to give up your entire life to write the novel of your life. You just have to be consistent, show up way more often than not, work hard when you’re there, and love it like it’s your child. Because it is: it’s something you will have created yourself that only looks somewhat like you.
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