Notes on NaNoWriMo

Book Review: 50,172 words sitting in a Google Doc on my computer

For years, there’s been a tradition of people trying to write a novel, i.e. 50,000 words, in the month of November. This picked up the name of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short.¹

This year, I won NaNoWriMo? I finished NaNoWriMo? Whatever we call doing NaNoWriMo successfully. I have 50,172 words written, over the 50,000 goal ever so slightly. It’s not my full novel idea — that’ll take maybe another 30,000 words — but it could be a short novel if I wanted to end it here.

I do intend on finishing it out to its full length, because it’d be satisfying to end what I began. I think it’s decent, but not publication quality, and I don’t really have an intent of doing what it’d take to get there. I also probably will never write any fiction this long again, although you never really know.

This isn’t because NaNoWriMo was a bad experience. I had a good time, and it was nice to prove that I can do it. But there are a lot of things I enjoy doing, and I don’t think I enjoy writing fiction more than whatever else I would do with my time. If I do something like this again, it’d probably be the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge, although I have my doubts about that also.

Still, I don’t regret doing it once. Once is probably the right number of times to do something like this, if you’re like me and curious about your fiction writing abilities but not committed to becoming a novelist. I think I learned a lot, and would like to think I’m a better writer at the end of it.

For instance, I learned that you absolutely should not write a book with any historical elements whatsoever without doing a ton of background research. Yes, this holds true even if it isn’t really “historical fiction” but some kind of speculative melange instead.² Yes, this holds true even if you’re decently historically informed. I kept having to pause my writing to go look at random Reddit threads and Wikipedia articles to answer questions like “what kinds of chairs did they have in 14th-15th century Europe?” These details matter, for my own sanity if nothing else.

I also learned that 50,000 words is really not that hard. I tried NaNoWriMo very briefly before when I was in eighth grade or so. I was trying to write some kind of science fiction/fantasy detective story and I ran out of plot pretty quickly, plus writing was taking all my time. This time, I am definitely older and maybe wiser and encountered no such problems. There is still a lot of plot left, and I didn’t really have to stretch myself to hit my word count goals. I did get behind and then surge ahead a lot, which is why I ended up finishing one day early.

That doesn’t mean that writing isn’t hard, but getting enough words on the page is the easy part. Making sure they’re good was way more difficult. The hard parts, in no particular order: getting the dialogue for different characters to sound different, plot realism or what passes for it in my context, having just the right amount of foreshadowing, not repeating certain expressions too much. In other words, most of it.

But there were a few skills in writing where I feel a bit more confident. Maybe they transfer better from my years as a high-school/college newspaper columnist and this blog? Grammar/spelling is pretty easy, especially with Google Docs’ spell check.³ I was more scared of pacing problems than I really should have been. Doing a lot of free indirect speech didn’t seem to go too badly either. I can’t say if these are true for anybody else, though.

I was still glad I purposefully picked a story idea that was pretty easy to write. I’m not ready to reveal the exact details yet, but I started out with three separate plots I was considering writing. I chose this one because I didn’t feel like I was biting off too much. It had a measured scope and a pretty neat resolution in ways that the others didn’t. Admittedly, I haven’t written much fiction before this, but what I had written was speculative-ish, so that was another advantage. I also had some license to write more stylized prose, not the sorts of natural or lyrical voices a lot of books aim for nowadays. That probably made it easier, but I’m not sure.

I think you’re supposed to come away with a lot more respect for fiction writers after trying to do it yourself. I don’t really think I did. My instincts alternate between thinking that I’m missing some special kind of understanding that dooms me to never write anything good, and thinking that if I just practiced some and really wanted to I could easily get published. Then I come down to Earth and conclude that I shouldn’t be overconfident but also that it’s very doable.⁴

So I think I’d recommend doing NaNoWriMo to other people, even if I’m probably never going to do it again.⁵ I possibly intend on writing more short stories, and it’s definitely good practice for that. It’s also nice to think about it as cross-training for non-fiction; I’m not sure about the effectiveness but it can be a fun change of pace. Just learn from my mistakes and memorize a very detailed map of Spanish kingdoms before you so much as think about putting a word on the page.

1. It’s also an organization that made a website for NaNoWriMo and then collapsed under a bunch of scandals, but that’s mostly irrelevant to actually writing.

2. I’m not sure my story technically counts as speculative fiction but I’m not sure what else to call it.

3. The grammar check is horrendous and I had to keep it off to not be deluged in false alarms.

4. I have a whole other set of opinions about how we shouldn’t worry if people aren’t getting paid enough to be professional writers because plenty of writers throughout history did it on the side and produced great works, but that really needs to be its own post if I ever feel confident enough to write it up more thoroughly.

5. Unless you have a really busy job or other major commitment. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared, but I still couldn’t have done it if I had a lot of quiz bowl writing to do in November.