NaNoWriMo: A Postmortem
In which my tired brain tries to recap what happened and reflect on the future.
It came. It was here. And now it’s gone. NaNoWriMo is a whirlwind every year, but this year feels like a special kind of crazy to me.
I went in with a plan. I carefully considered every nuance–how past Nanos had gone, what I had learned from them, and what I wanted to achieve this year. I was going to achieve balance with a reasonable goal of a few thousand words per week.
I wasn’t going to write every day. Rest and recovery would be my priority between writing sprints.
And in the end, I wouldn’t be so burned out that I would achieve a great lot of nothing in December.
And with my carefully laid plans, I managed–not to do anything according to plan.
Best Laid Plans
Okay, so here me out.
There is a kind of mania that happens with Nano. This energy.
Maybe it’s just me.
Maybe it’s the pull of my overachieving perfectionist compulsion carefully honed throughout eighteen years of schooling.
Maybe it’s the crowd mind.
Maybe it’s Maybelline.
We may never know.
I planned to reread my progress in the draft over the first couple of days. There were 85,000 words, so I built buffer time in. An additional two days if needed.
But then it took a week.
Next, I needed to consider the plot and make sure what I had planned would still work.
But then I read Save the Cat Writes a Novel and questioned everything.
So by the time I finally sat down to write, we were already two weeks into November. I only had 16 days left.
That’s okay, I told myself. I had never planned to hit 50k anyway. I just wanted to make good progress on my draft so I could finish it by the end of the year.
On the first writing day, I wrote over 4,000 words.
Well. That was a bit of a surprise.
Then on day 2, I wrote another 3,000.
The Nano site told me that I only had to write 3,000 words a day to finish on time.
That seemed…doable. I had already done it twice. But maybe those were flukes. Maybe I couldn’t do that regularly.
But I did it again and again.
Slowly, that gap was closing.
Could I write 50,000 words in two weeks?
It seemed absurd. Impossible. A sure recipe for burnout.
But…could I?
The overachiever in me couldn’t resist the challenge.
So I kept aiming for that 3k a day. And slowly, day by day, I made my way to 50k.
I experienced a growing sense of fatigue. It took a lot of work to sustain that pace. 3k a day every day was a lot of words and a lot of creativity. The pace didn’t leave much space for the visualization I needed to craft the following scenes.
And then came the challenge—some of the authors on youtube that I follow attempt a 10k day. I watched a vlog of someone who tried it. I had a day off…and there was only 10k between me and catching up to par and only a little over 11k between me and winning Nano.
So after debating with myself for half a day, I committed to it. I was going to do my best to write 10k in one day.
Writing sprint after writing sprint. Snack breaks. Writing Sprint. Shower break. Sprint. Dinner break. Sprint. Walking the dog break. More writing sprints. And I managed it. Not only did I hit 10 k in a day, but I wrote enough words to close that final gap and win Nanowrimo.
I laughed in victory! I hooted in triumph! I crowed in ecstasy!
And then I did nothing for four days.
Eventually, I pushed myself to finish the draft’s last two and a half scenes so that I didn’t completely abandon it and leave it unfinished until January.
Then I returned to doing nothing.
The Cost
So. Despite my easy-does-it plan, of slow-and-steady-wins-the-race velocity, I pushed myself, and I won Nanowrimo. This is what I have learned.
I expected regularly writing 3k words to be challenging to me. Granted, I am a volume writer, and when I fast draft, these aren’t necessarily good words. But that’s a part of my process too.
I get the story on the page, like an artist color-blocking on a canvas. And then, I go back in and add color, shadows, and highlights until it finally looks right. It takes time and more revisions than a sane person would probably commit to. But it’s what works for me.
So, 3k words in a day are not unrealistic. But writing every day is. As I mentioned before, it was not just the volume of writing that was tiring, but there wasn’t enough time to visualize what was happening.
Another crucial part of my process (and probably many writers? I don’t know) is that I daydream the scenes into life. I close my eyes and watch it unfold before me like a movie. And when I have a pretty solid idea of how it unfolds, then I put it down on paper.
If I’m writing so much daily, there isn’t enough room in my schedule for daydreaming. So I need those days not just to rest and recover, but to refill the well and dream.
I am capable of more than I imagined. But I also need to give myself the space to rest and dream.
December
I’m most interested to see the cost of this mad dash on my December productivity. I am still exhausted six days after Nano ended. It’s a struggle to write this blog and my newsletter. But how much of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy? And how much of my inability to get anything done in December is just the natural progression of my seasons?
Winter is a time of hibernation, after all.
So I will let you know how it goes this December and how much I can achieve.
Next Year
Will I participate next year? That’s hard to say. A lot depends on timing. Book 1 will be published by then (screams), and book two will be deep in preparation. Will I be starting or finishing book 3? Perhaps.
Regardless, Nano was a roller coaster yet again. It proved that I am capable of more than I imagined but also human and need rest and time to dream. I will keep these lessons close to my heart as I write in the new year.