Larry M. Coleman

NaNoWriMo Day 30

What if 30 days wasn’t enough to write your 50,000 words? In other words, you’ve come up on 11:59 p.m. and you didn’t “beat” NaNoWriMo?

Join the “normals.” About 7 out of 8 people who start NaNoWriMo don’t finish it. But just by starting it, you did something.

The good news is that you get double your entry fee back. Of course, NaNoWriMo is free to join, so that means you get twice of nothing when it comes to money, but what you got out of it was worth more than money.

You found a way to write that doesn’t work for you. That’s valuable. You can use that to plan your attack on your novel next year.

Maybe you needed more practice turning off your psychic censor. There’s no shame in that; after all, you spent your entire life with it on. Turning it off is unnatural at first. It can take practice.

Maybe you came in with a huge plan and then had difficulty turning that minutely-detailed scaffolding into a novel. That’s good to know: try leaving yourself and your novel a little more room to grow next year.

Or maybe you had the opposite problem and went in with no plan at all other than perhaps a brilliant idea. That’s fun to try but hard to pull off. It’s like trying to jump off the front of a moving train, hit the ground at a sprint, and keep outrunning it. You’re probably just going to get flattened. Next year you’ll know to spend October jotting down at least a few character sketches, ideas for settings, and so on to plop that brilliant idea down into.

Maybe it was time management. Or simply not making and taking time to write. Muses are like cats: they won’t come to you. If you want to hear her purr, you have to go to her. That’s the real value in NaNoWriMo: if you have a 30-day deadline, you have to go to her. You don’t have time to wait. You learned that this year, and that’s valuable to know.

If this isn’t your first time trying but not making the 50k mark, you’re far from alone. I know people who are good writers who have tried multiple times and not made it yet. Back in the old dial-up days of the very early 2000s, I tried it twice in a row and wrote a total of about 8,000 words in those two attempts combined. I took over 15 years off, gave it a third try in 2020, and now in two days, I’ll be starting my attempt for my fifth victory in a row. You can, but only if you learn from it and hop right back in next year.

There is no failure but the failure to try, and if you showed up this year and wrote 1,000 words, 10,000 words, or 40,000 words, you created more than 99% of people (including you) would have otherwise. I know writers who won’t even attempt NaNoWriMo. Some of them even mock it as “non-serious” writing, often as a transparent way to hide the fact that the very idea of writing in a novel in a month scares the hell out of them. Even if you didn’t slay the beast, at least you had the courage to step into the arena.

Fortunately, it’s October 30th and not November 30th, so best of luck to you next month!