Every year since 2014, the first year I finished Nanowrimo, I have been able to complete the 50,000 words without much fear of coming up short. I’ve had my close calls here and there, but by and large I have never put myself in a situation where I felt didn’t have a chance of finishing. I’ve always been consistent with my hourly word counts and I don’t get hung up on perfectionism in my Nanowrimo writing. For seven years, I have completed Nanowrimo with relative ease.
Last year when I finished, I decided to go bigger with the next one: Seventy-five thousand words. At the time it seemed like an achievable goal. Hell, I was positively certain it wouldn't be an issue. This year, as the month approached, I knew I could do it but I'd need to get the legs warmed up before I took on such a long race. To prepare, I wrote 50k in October, getting my pace up, and then cruised into November knocking out the requisite 2500 words a day, more or less, that would get me to the 75k finish line.
I reached the standard Nanowrimo goal of 50k words on the twentieth, right on schedule, and then a little bit of wind went out of my sails. It wasn’t that the story wasn’t engaging or that I'd run out of material, but surpassing that shared goal, the same goal everyone strove for during Nanowrimo, had taken me into new territory, a place where I have struggled my whole life—the land of self-motivation. I’ve always been a terrible self-motivator, and once I passed that communal threshold, I knew I might be in a little trouble. Not so much that I would fail—that never seemed a realistic possibility because my word count output has been so high—but it was certainly seemed more possible than it had been all month. Then Thanksgiving hit, and I didn’t get any writing done. I didn’t get any writing done the next day either. In just a few short days I found myself 10,000 words behind the pace and with very little time left on the clock. I needed to buckle down.
When November 30th arrived, I needed to write just over 9000 words. Even with my output topping 2k an hour a couple of times through the month and hovering around 1400/hr, this was a towering obstacle. Additionally, it was a workday and I would need to get my writing done sandwiched around my work schedule, making the task even more difficult.
I was able to put away about 1500 words before work, which was not a strong effort at all, considering how early I get up and how much time I had to write. I was still not taking it seriously, or maybe I was starting to think it was too much and I was giving up. I was left having to write over 7k words when I walked out of my office at five. It was a cold and sleety night, and instead of going home, I drove to a coffee shop to give myself a better shot at knocking some words out. By the time I got home, it was 9 pm, and I still had over 5,000 words to write. Not insurmountable under normal circumstances. But I was exhausted, both mentally and physically, and worst of all, I didn’t need to do this. It was, after all, just a personal goal I had set for myself. I fail at personal goals all the time, why shouldn’t this be any different?
I nearly quit and went to bed. I remember I looked at my fiancee and gave her a look that implied if she told me it was okay to give it up, I would do it right then. Fortunately, she didn’t take the bait. Instead, I decided to give it another hour. I would bust out a hard hour of writing, and if I was in a good spot, I’d keep going. If I floundered, I would call the contest and live with the mild disappointment of coming up just short. I shifted gears and ditched the Jazz and blasted loud music, put my head down, and plowed ahead.
When my timer went off after an hour, I looked at my word count: 2200. I just put in one of my most productive hours ever. I knew then I could finish. The content wasn’t an issue; the story was making itself up as I went, and the garden of plans I had going into this was still populated with enough produce to get me to the finish line. At this point, it was just a matter of staying awake. At 11:00 pm I hit a wall. I still had 1500 words to go, but man, was I worn out. At 11:55, as I was wrapping up the epilogue of this fun mess of a story, I checked my word count and saw I was still short by around a hundred words. I finished in a mad flurry of storytelling, and at 11:59 pm, I updated my word count on the official Nanowrimo page: 75020 words. Man, what a race. When I finished I ran through the apartment. I danced. I was no longer tired. I felt only elation and pride.
In writing, they say a character must, through the course of the story, grow or learn something that fundamentally changes them. So what have I learned? Unlike my first Nanowrimo success, I don’t think I can say I learned I was able to write a certain amount of words. When I completed Nanowrimo the first time I experienced this awakening to what I was capable of. Here, I gave myself this challenge knowing I could do it, I just needed to try. I guess the most important lesson I learned is I am capable of prodigious output and even occasionally decent writing when I am disciplined and stick to my routines. Most of all, I learned not to give up when facing writing adversity. Anyone who has ever written knows how difficult it can be, how often writer’s block rears its head, how the creative well is so often bone dry, or the writing you create will look simple and unrefined and just plain bad. Writing is about trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing even more, but as long as you keep trying and don’t let that seductive voice lead you down the path of least resistance, you will eventually find success. That’s what I think anyway.
What’s the goal for next year? I haven’t thought about it. Now that I’ve finished this hefty undertaking and taken a long month off, I need to reset with the new year and get back to a diverse set of writing projects. I’ll still be trying to write 50k a month, but I recognize I can do that without sacrificing all other writing I want to accomplish. For now, I plan on catching up on everything I left on the back burners and making plans for an exciting 2021.
Daniel Gorman
dgor88@gmail.com
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