NaNoWriMo: What I’ve Learned After One Week

NaNoWriMo is actually pretty great and quite different from my expectations going in. If you read my previous post about why I’m participating, then you know this is my first attempt at it. 

Expectations:

“This is going to take up all my free time to meet the word count every day. I’m going to be miserable and my wife is going to be annoyed that I’m putting off chores and our house will be a disaster.”

“I can’t wait to meet this large community, make some great new friends who have common interests, and maybe create a future writing group.”

“I’ll start a new project without any background prep and work on improving my pantsing skills.”

“I’m going to fail.”

These haven’t really held true so far…

Here are my statistics after 1 week (and 1 day):

Reality:

Writing Time – As you can see from my stats above, I can crank out the 1667 daily word count in a little over an hour. This is about 3X faster than I expected and you can clearly see how it’s improved over the course of the week. Setting that goal helped me to expedite my writing speed. And now that I have that pace going, I’m eager to keep up with it and not drop below 1000 words/hour. I’m shocked at how well this is motivating me so far, because typically self-imposed deadlines don’t work great for me. The words aren’t perfect and it’s definitely not as clean or professional-sounding as I’d like, but it’s a first draft and that’s what I’m aiming for.

Community – I joined a few groups (my local community and a Fantasy-specific group that formed in the forum). I check in the discords about every other day, but they aren’t too active. I am interested in what everyone else is doing, however, I really just don’t have the extra time to commit to digging in, which makes me sad. Part of this is on me for not engaging as well. I do keep track with a few people on twitter and that has added a bit to the sense of community. It keeps me motivated to not give up and keep pace with some other great writers.

New Project – I started the first few days working on this new project, which I had thought about a bit. I knew the basic idea, some main characters, the beginning, and the end. However, the fear of just making up plot and character decisions as I went was too much for me. My original goal was to start posting this new project online as soon as NaNoWriMo ended, but I could already tell that I wouldn’t be happy enough with the end results to do that and it would require a lot of editing and restructuring before I could post anywhere with confidence. On top of that, I was actually impressed that I was meeting the daily minimums and a lightbulb went off–if I put this productivity towards my WIP, it would be done by the end of the month! So I shifted my project and couldn’t be happier with the decision.

Failure – Self-doubt is a real thing. I suffer from it every day. I know many writers do. If one week of NaNoWriMo has shown me anything, it’s that I can do this. It’s not as impossible as I made it out to be in my head. The higher we hold a goal up on a pedestal and convince ourselves it’s unreachable, the more difficult we make it for ourselves to reach. I truly believe now, that the biggest hurdle in writing 50k words in a month is mental. I was shocked hearing about authors pumping out 3-4 books a year. Even for authors writing 1-2 books in a year, I couldn’t comprehend how they accomplished it with a full time job on top of that. (Some even do it with kids as well!) But now I’m starting to understand and I’m starting to think: “Maybe I can do that too.”

Lessons:

You don’t need massive chunks of time to write. This has truly been a revelation for me so far during NaNoWriMo. In the past, I didn’t think I could be productive in the time I had available, so I constantly put off writing. But in reality, 20-30 minute intervals are great and I can actually make way more progress in terms of word count in that window than I expected. At my current pace, three or four 20 minute writing sessions a day would meet the 1667 goal. 

You can increase your pace and gain momentum for individual writing sessions by preparing at least a vague outline, by thinking about what comes next when you’re not writing, and by retaining that residual excitement from your previous writing session to cheer you on.

The biggest takeaway here for me is that it doesn’t have to be November to do this. I thought that participating in NaNoWriMo was going to take over my life, but it really hasn’t. I love writing and I’m happy to be doing it daily, however, it doesn’t consume all my free time. I still take my puppy for walks, make dinner with my wife, watch TV here and there, and (of course) go to work.

If this is life as a part-time author… I’ll gladly take it.