Hello everyone!
It’s finally here! National Novel Writing Month, the writing competition to try to finish a complete book or 50,000 words within the month of November.
This is my third year participating in NaNoWriMo. My first was in 2019, and I’ve chosen NaNoWriMo as the time of year to write the first drafts of my novels ever since. It’s fit my release schedule very well, as so far all three of my books have had publication dates in January, giving me a little over a year to write the book, go through a series of edits, and get everything in line to meet my release window.
The first year was a bit of a challenge because it was the second novel I was writing in 2019. I’d started writing Lock the Doors at the start of 2019 because I’d wanted (and kind of needed) to complete a story to release in 2020, and the manuscript I’d drafted in 2018 wasn’t it. While I was going through the process of getting Lock the Doors ready for release, I was also outlining I’m Not my Father leading up to writing it for my first NaNoWriMo. I knew I was pushing myself to finish a second novel within a year, but it was worth it to me to get onto the schedule I wanted going forward.
It’s a fun challenge, and honestly, one that I’ve never been successful at, always falling short of the word count, as well as just missing finishing the first draft by a few days. It’s always okay though to me. I feel the real point of NaNoWriMo is to stimulate writing, and the fact that I’ve always finished the manuscript, even after the month ended, has always made me feel like the competition was a success.
So after months of brainstorming ideas, and then what felt like an endless outlining process, how much did I end up writing on the first day of NaNo?
One page.
500 words exactly.
It’s not much, in fact it’s less than one third of what my daily average should be to reach the 50k goal. And to me, the day was a success.
Why? When I’ve been working out the details of what’s going to happen in the story for months, to the point where I have notes to piece together the story inside and out, why is such a low page and word count a success to me?
Because despite how much time I’ve already spent working out the story in my head and in my notebooks, there is still such a long journey ahead of me. I feel a big part of writing, and a reason why so many hopefuls get discouraged is because they’re unable to keep up the momentum of the writing process. I can see aspiring authors getting off to hot starts, but once they experience a slowdown, and they’re not keeping the same quick pace, that momentum starts swinging the other way and sadly, great original ideas start to gather cobwebs.
So to battle that momentum, I always start my first day of writing with a very attainable goal. One page. Thirty to sixty minutes set aside to convert my notes into one full page. It’s an easy win, and once I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ve got this mini success I can point to when I sit down to write the next day, when I push myself to write a little bit more.
Until next week.