Today’s post is going to be all about National Novel Writing Month otherwise known as NaNoWriMo.
I’ll be going through what it is, how you can get involved, and my own experience with the challenge.
As this year was my first time doing it, I figured I could reflect on it as a way of measuring my progress, but also to look back on if I do attempt NaNo again in the future.
What is NaNoWriMo?
Known as national novel writing month, Nanowrimo started in 1999 simply as a goal to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Whilst the community started small, it has grown overtime thanks to their generous donators and participants spreading the word about the challenge. In 2017 Nanowrimo used their fundraiser to create the official Nanowrimo website we know and use today.
Now known worldwide, Nanowrimo claims to have hundreds of thousands of people world wide participating every Novemeber. Not surprising given it is entirely free to sign up and participate. The organisation promotes participation from people of every age and every background, and is also promoted by many educators — this is how I first found out about it, through my creative writing degree.
The challenge may appear quite daunting, but remember it spans over the space of a month, and if 50,000 is too big of a starting goal, there are other options to challenge yourself with. One may be to write a novella (25,000 words instead) and if the numbers are still too high, there’s also the option to set your own goals and the time frame in which you have to achieve them.
How do you participate?
Quite simply, you just write! The official nanowrimo site is free to sign up to and comes with your very own dashboard to monitor all your writing in one place. Alongside this, the site has a page for community features such as friends lists, regional events and even virtually organised events with guest speakers. And if that wasn’t enough, there is also a whole section dedicated to writer’s resources, where you can find all the tips and tricks on where to start and how to prep for the next nanowrimo challenge.
Whilst the website is a handy tool to monitor your progress, you can participate completely offline and without registering an account too! The only down side to this is that you won’t receive any of the free winner’s goodies and badges when you do finally hit that big 50,000 goal.
My NaNoWriMo 2023
So did I complete Nano this year? Yes, I did, by the skin of my teeth and 110 words over target.
I’d known for years about the challenge, but I’d always found it daunting, the idea of actually writing 50,000 words in a month. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but many people, myself included, will find that their first draft of their novel won’t be complete at 50,000 words. And when you do realise that, it really puts into perspective how much you can actually write if only you put your mind to it.
I don’t know what prompted me to attempt the challenge this year, perhaps a nudge from a medium I visited early this year who told me to write more, but it has always been something I wanted to try. So I optimistically signed up, joined the discord server for the Oxfordshire region and set myself to the challenge. The site itself will tell you that you can write 1,667 words a day and you’ll hit 50,000 words by day 30, but I quite harshly told myself I’d aim for 2,000 words a day.
To say that didn’t last long is an understatement. Finding the time to write around life and work was a tricky task, especially when my shifts weren’t a consistent pattern. So some days I found I wrote a little over 2,000 and some days I wrote barely 1,000. But the overarching motive behind nanowrimo was to make sure you were writing everyday, even if you weren’t hitting the word count goals. So I reminded myself of that and decided on a new plan of action.
Days when I was at work, I’d come home and try to write, even if it wasn’t a lot. Then on my days off I would make up for the lost time and make up my word count. And this did work for me in the end. Until about halfway through the month, I began to get a sickening amount of pain in my wrists; most likely caused by RSI or carpal tunnel syndrome. Turns out typing everyday and working on a coffee machine everyday was not a good combination. I had to pause my writing all together and order two compression supports for my wrists which put me a good 6,000 to 9,000 words behind for the tail end of the month.
When you look at the stats for the challenge you can see when these days are because the progress graph stays level for days at a time then suddenly shoots up after I’ve written 5,000 words or so to try make up the progress. In the last week my stubborn determination kicked in and I kept writing despite the pain, refusing to be beaten by the challenge when I was so close to finishing it. In the last week I must have written over 15,000 words alone in the final sprint to the end and on the 30th Novemeber not long before midnight I finally hit the target at 50,110 words.
Whilst I took a huge sigh of relief, I was also surprised to find that despite so many words, my novel still remained incomplete. I haven’t written any more of it since I finished Nanowrimo yet either. This is because towards the end, the writing felt more like a burden than a challenge, so once I finished I gave myself a break to try and find the joy in writing again.
Nano has shown me how much I’m really capable of and I feel like I will most definitely try it again in future because there’s nothing like a challenge to motivate my stubborn determination. The novel I chose to work on has been one I’ve been struggling to start and finish since I started my A levels, so getting somewhere near the end of it felt like I had done the unthinkable. The only negative I found (aside from personal injury) was that sometimes it felt more like a burden than a challenge and the day I hit the goal I was overjoyed to not be duty bound to write again.
I hope that after being shown by this challenge how much I can write, that my first ever full draft of a novel will be completed within the next few months or so, so I can finally start editing and polishing the world and characters I have spent literal years developing and writing about in detail.
Lizzy Harrison 