I wish I remembered when I discovered National Novel Writing Month (NaNo, for short), which occurs in November. The concept is simple: write 1,667 words a day, and you’ll end up with a 50k draft of of a novel. There’s a whole online community to help people win NaNo and connect over the process.
What I do remember is my first NaNo: November 2017. My boyfriend (now my husband) and I had just started doing long-distance, and I’d been plugging away with a dystopian romance YA manuscript that wasn’t going anywhere. With each revision, I found myself faced with new problems to fix and getting further and further away from the vision I originally had– scenes that had struck me in the middle of the night that I scribbled down before I could forget. And then I had a dream, a dream that turned into the first scene of a brand new story that I desperately wanted to discover.
I’d received positive feedback from a first page webinar I did, and that was enough for me to switch course. I shelved the dystopian romance (which was truly terrible, and since then other novels with a very similar premise that no doubt were better written have been published) and jumped into this story using NaNo.
I personally do not use the official organization program, although I’ve heard it’s amazing (and have included a link above!). NaNo has always been something I’ve done on my own or discussed with my critique partners. Plus, there are other writing related months (April and July are known as “camp,” focused on individual writing projects, and October is known as Preptober!) that can be really fun and helpful. It’s what works for you!
Since 2017, I’ve done NaNo for all my other manuscript projects since. I haven’t always “won,” (as in, hitting 50k words), but that’s okay! I’ve always managed to write something, and that has always been very helpful.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
- It’s great motivation for churning out that first draft, which is messy and flawed and chaotic.
- It can be really fun with tracking your word count! I used shiny star stickers for every day I made my word count.
- It’s not for everyone.
- You need to know your style for this to work. My most successful NaNo drafts were when I had done a lot more outlining and prewriting beforehand. I’m still working on untangling that manuscript from 2017, to be honest (now a YA contemporary fantasy).
- You can find a community with this!
If you’ve completed NaNo, I’d love to hear about your experience! If it’s something you’ve been thinking about, I hope you try it this November!
