I wrote a novel! (sort of)

Last month, as a first-time participant in November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I committed to writing 50,000 words of the first draft of a novel.

On November 29 at around 5:30 PM, as I was hunched over a coffee shop table, typing furiously in my Scrivener writing program, a little alert box popped up on my screen.

I finished writing down my thought, updated my word count on the NaNoWriMo website, and turned my laptop around to show this to my friend:

I felt a warm, tingling sensation in my body. I couldn’t help but smile. I let out a not-too-loud “woo!” This was the best I had felt about an accomplishment since I reached the top of Yosemite’s Half Dome a few years ago.

50,000 words. That’s an average of 1,667 words per day–as long as some of the short stories I’ve written.

Am I ready to publish my novel? Not even close. But after having 0 words as of October 31, I now have about 200 pages (double-spaced) of raw material to draw from as I write future drafts.

I’ll share a few things I learned along the way to 50k.

Writing without editing is liberating

I took a vacation the first week in November; I wanted the time and space to start building my writing habit. Even with the entire day to myself, I really had to fight my tendency to procrastinate in order to hit my daily word target of 1,667.

Once I was back to work and other commitments, I had far less time to work with. I wrote every day, but some days I only wrote a few paragraphs, and I had to play catch-up on weekends.

But I quickly learned that the only way I was going to reach my goal was if I resisted the urge to self-edit. Being a perfectionist, it was painful at first to write without going back and tweaking things. But had I edited my work, it probably would have tripled the time commitment.

I also didn’t write the scenes in order. One day I’d write a scene that might be a hundred pages away from the one I wrote the day before. The opening and ending scenes came to me around week two or three.

Although it felt like fighting against my nature to write this way, something changed after the first several days. I started to feel a sense of freedom. So the scenes are out of order–I can fix it later. So this scene might not work at all–write it anyway and decide later. I realized I had little to lose by writing something and throwing it out later. But if I started overthinking, all I’d end up with was the same result I had before November: a lonely, blank page waiting to become part of the “perfect” story.

It helps to have support

Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been operating on the mantra that this novel is for me. I wanted to know what it would feel like to write a novel without worrying about what other people think. And there was no way I would have gotten through November if everything I wrote had to pass through the “is it good enough to share?” filter.

A lot of people don’t even know I’m working on a novel, and those who do don’t know much about what it’s about. I worry that if I share too much, people will provide feedback that derails my progress: things that don’t make sense, things that should change, things they would do if they were writing the novel. None of this should affect me. I should be able to just say, “thanks for your comments” and do what I feel is right. But I know myself, and I’m not as resilient as I’d like to be.

However, for NaNoWriMo, I found there is strength in numbers. It helped to know that potentially hundreds of thousands of people were participating with me. Knowing that only 10-15% of the annual participants meet the 50,000-word target gave me some extra, competitive drive.

But there was also a handful of people I know personally who made a big difference. Four other people in my writing group agreed to join NaNoWriMo with me. Without divulging our content, we asked questions and shared our struggles and triumphs to help each other keep going. I had a friend who joined me multiple times at a coffee shop for focused writing time, including staying with me the day I hit 50k. I had friends and family who would simply ask, “how’s the writing coming along?” Just as I’m not impervious to criticism, I’m also not numb to encouragement. Having support and feeling like I was part of a community helped propel me to complete this writing marathon.

Source material is everywhere

I collected a lot of books for research leading up to November. My collection grew in November. In the past, I would occasionally pick up a book, read a few pages, and take notes that I’d likely never look at again. But once I started writing my novel, those books became treasure chests. I could read as little as a sentence or two and it would spark an idea that might turn into an entire chapter. I get distracted easily and have a lot of unfinished books on my shelves, but with this kind of result, I didn’t have to feel guilty about it. Even one line of inspiration is worth it to me.

A lot of my research was accidental. One day I was watching an interview on YouTube that had nothing (I thought) to do with my novel, but a point came up in the conversation that inspired a scene in my story. While trying to come up with the story location, I ended up borrowing elements from the place I’d stayed on vacation weeks prior. I even made a connection to a movie I haven’t seen in twenty years.

When you become immersed in an unfinished world as I did while working on this novel–and I imagine the same would go for drawing or interior design or any other creative outlet–everything could become a source of inspiration. This also helped me spend less time shoegazing and more time paying attention to my surroundings.

Writing characters can be therapeutic

There are elements of myself in my characters. The deeper I dove into their backstories, their personalities, and their motivations, the more I began to realize about myself. And because characters need an “arc” (the transformation they go through over the course of the story), I had to put them in challenging situations and then figure out how to get them out of them. In my life story, my character arc is still (I hope) a long way from being finished. But trying to help my characters through their problems actually helped me devise some solutions for myself–sometimes through action, and sometimes just by making peace with the way things are.

Habits are addictive

It took a lot of discipline to write every day for a month. But the longer I maintained my streak, the harder it became to let myself stop.

Now that I’ve hit 50k, I could decide it’s time to take a break. But I don’t want to. I’m not going to worry about quantity anymore, but I intend to write at least a sentence or two every day.

I’ll keep doing research, but instead of taking notes that lie buried in a notebook, whatever ideas I come up with will go straight into my story where I know I’ll revisit them.

It may take a while, but given what I’ve accomplished in just one month, I’m now far more confident that I will complete this novel.