I was planning on posting this yesterday, but I needed some time to process.
Day 30 Word Count: 50,017
I won NaNoWriMo!
What does winning mean?
Winning NaNoWriMo is pretty simple: you just have to write 50,000 words in the month of November.
But for me…well, I wanted to challenge myself to finish a story. Thinking through my motivation to take on this ridiculous and insane project, I was reminded of myself at 10. In 5th grade, I took a creative writing elective. I thought that since I love to read, maybe I’d like to write, too. It was a 9-week course and all you needed to do to get a decent grade was write a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It needed to be something like 5 pages.
I never got past the beginning. Two weeks late, I turned in 20 pages of exposition without a whisper of rising action. I got a B-. It was the lowest grade I got until college.
So I concluded that I wasn’t a writer. It just wasn’t for me. I didn’t have It. And that self-image persevered through the next 20 years of compulsive journaling, three attempts at starting a blog, and a career that hinges on my ability to use a variety of data to tell compelling stories.
But now, I know I was wrong. I’m not a good writer by any means, but just from having taken the time to put pen to paper (er, fingers to keys?), sure, I’m a writer.
What did I learn?
Writing is fun
I used to think I needed some sort of plan or training or practice, but honestly, you can just put words to the page. It doesn’t mean you’ll be any good, but that doesn’t matter. And this applies to most the things in my life that I wish I could do: if I want to do it, I need to go do it. I probably won’t be any good at it at first. But if I commit to really try something new, I’ll figure out if it’s something I want to keep in my life or not.
Writing every day is hard
I’ve talked about this in most of my NaNoWriMo check-ins, but hot damn is doing something every day for 30 days in a row hard! I didn’t write every day (I skipped 4 days and wrote <1k words on 3 days). But honestly, struggling through the days where you hate every word gave me the opportunity to have days where I actually liked some sentences.
I have three friends that made up a support group for doing NaNoWriMo. One of them wrote every damn day. Another didn’t start until the 10th and wrote over half of her word count in the last three days. Each of them are terrifying in their own way for being so tenacious.
Writing is a lot like life
I set out to prove that I can come to a believable ending to a story. And I succeeded. What struck me is that writing gives you the power to have any ending that you want – and that’s really hard. To the end, I found iterations and subplots I could have written in.
Seriously. On the last day, I added: exactly one section from a new point of view, the end of a love triangle (without laying the groundwork for it at the beginning), AND skipped about three key scenes for the rising action.
And that’s just the stuff I chose to write! There are plot holes galore in my monstrosity, not to mention 8 THOUSAND words at the beginning laying out a plot that I didn’t even follow.
Anyway. The point I wanted to make here was that there are so many possibilities I could have written in, but didn’t. Just like how there’s an alternate universe where I became a math teacher. Or an electrician. Or moved to Chicago. Or owned a French Bulldog named Fiona. Completing NaNoWriMo forced me to leave behind the alternate realities I had for my characters and write one reality to the end of the story.
Just like life.
So…can I read your book?
Nope.
Seriously. I’M not even reading my book (yet). I’m going to take 2 weeks and not even open the file. Then, I’ll sit down and read it from beginning to end and decide if I want to take any time to edit it or if I want to chalk it up to a learning opportunity.
If I decide to edit it, maybe some of you will have an opportunity to read excerpts in about a year.
Until then, I’m going to be busy working on my system to be bad at things and finally putting all my laundry away. Oh, and referring to this project casually as “my latest novel”.
