Just Write It
Each November, hundreds of thousands of writers around the world hunker down with keyboards and tablets, or old-school legal pads and pens, to pull raw magic from their brains and write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It’s called National Novel Writing Month, or more colloquially, NaNoWriMo.
During those 30 days, these keyboard masochists attempt 1,667 words a day—if they’re splitting the word count equally. They gather in groups for write-ins or sequester themselves in libraries, in cafés, in corners, or wherever they can find the space and time to write. Some of them are professional novelists, but most, like myself, have more prosaic day jobs.
I’m a writer-for-hire, yes, but the vast percentage of the words I write are not for me, and do not call up imaginatively-peopled fictional worlds. I’m one of the writers in the Dropbox Brand Studio. Most of my writing time is devoted to words about all the ways in which Dropbox is a smart workspace, helping people work together in more enlightened ways.
But for several months leading up to last November, I felt a growing urge to write a book. I even spoke the words out loud, telling a few people that I was going to write a book.
One of those people was my Dropbox writing compatriot and desk neighbor, Chris Baty. Turns out, he was the absolute best person I could have told.
Because one shining summer day in 1999, Chris started NaNoWriMo. He founded the whole shindig. Of course, at the time, it was a small shindig with just a few friends involved. Together, they agreed on a 50,000-word goal and on the first of the month, got together to begin banging out their novels. Chris wasn’t trying to start a writing revolution, he just wanted to test himself, to “shake things up.” And he didn’t want to do it alone.
Twenty years later, Chris is still getting together with other people to write 50,000 words—but now there are thousands and thousands of them. Last year, 287,327 people NaNoWriMoed. And 29% of them—or 35,387, made it to their goal of 50,000 words or more. In NaNoWriMo parlance, they were “winners.”
Rules and Rebels
Those accomplishments are nothing to sneeze at. So I decided to give it a go—with a few of my own caveats. (As an Enneagram 4, I’m prone to rebelling against the rules, just because they’re there.)
My first rebellion was to not write a novel. Instead, I was shooting for a not-novel. A memoir-ish thing.
Second, I absolutely ignored the NaNo rule that says you can only count words actually written during November—you can’t count previously written prose. Since I was building my not-novel around previously-written poetry and essays, I included those in my final word count. I have no regrets.
After all, I wasn’t trying to compete against anyone. I wasn’t trying to win. My aim was to write a beginning. A really huge, 50k-word beginning. Or a shitty first draft, as author Anne Lamott describes it in her well-loved book on writing, Bird by Bird: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”
As someone who makes a living via words, I am intimately acquainted with the obstinate obstacle of the blank page. Getting started is often the very hardest thing.
When you’re trying to craft something you truly care about, it’s even harder. You hold in your head this gorgeous vision of what you want to make, but when you try—or even think about trying—to take it out of your head and make it live in the visible world, it feels like it’s falling apart.
Just a few weeks before Chris challenged me to NaNoWriMo my way into (a beginning of) a book, I sat across the table from another friend, telling her all the reasons I shouldn’t write one.
No one is going to read it.
I’m just a white woman from Dixon, Illinois. Who cares?
What do I have to say that’s so great, anyway?
Who do I think I am, telling people stuff about life?
Really, no one is going to read it, though.
And she just looked at me calmly and said, “LaDonna, you just finished telling a whole lot of people that they don’t need permission from anyone to use their voice. And now here you are, silencing yourself!”
Gulp. Right.
So there I was, on the very first day of November, staring at a blinking cursor and cracking my knuckles over a keyboard. I was excited, I was nervous, and I was determined to make that 50,000 goal. No matter what, I promised myself, I would write every. single. day.
And I did. I wrote every day. And every where. In hotels and waiting rooms, in airplanes and pickup trucks, in beds and bathrooms. I wrote at 5:30am and 10:30pm. I wrote at work, on vacation, on Thanksgiving, and on my birthday. Some days I wrote well over 3,000 words. One day I wrote only 144.
Every morning when I walked in to Dropbox, Chris Baty—Mister 20-Time-NaNoWriMo-Novel-Writer himself—would swivel his desk chair my way and say with a knowing twinkle, “How ya doin’ today? How’s your word count?”
I sincerely couldn’t have done it without him. (I’d like to think he couldn’t have done it without me, either. But I’m a realist.)
In November, between the two of us, we wrote 101,572 words. (I won’t tell you who wrote more, but 51,545 of those words were mine.)
Any Month Is Novel Writing Month
If you’re feeling energized and inspired and itching for a blank page to make your mark on (and why wouldn’t you be?!), Chris’s book No Plot? No Problem! is a great place to get ideas for how to start.
But also, it’s important to remember that whatever you want to write is legit. You want to write start a novel in 30 days? Great. But you could also finish a novel. Or revise one. Or write a not-novel. A series of essays. A blog post a day. A poem a day! (I’m happy to tell you that April is, in fact, National Poetry Writing Month: NaPoWriMo.)
Write what you need to write.
For me, the most valuable part of this entire experience was adhering to two particular rules* that Chris lays out in his book:
By invoking an absurd, month-long deadline on such an enormous undertaking, I understand that notions of “craft,” “brilliance,” and “competency” are to be chucked right out the window, where they will remain, ignored, until they are retrieved for the editing process.
I understand that I am a talented person, capable of heroic acts of creativity, and I will give myself enough time over the course of the next month to allow my innate gifts to come to the surface, unmolested by self-doubt, self-criticism, and other acts of self-bullying.
Shutting down that perfectionist voice in my head, the naysayer yelling, “NO ONE IS GOING TO READ THIS!” allowed me to write through the doubt and the fear. And now I am the very proud owner of a less-shitty-than-expected first draft. The very beginnings of my book.
Bonus: Read more about Chris and I and our co-Nano-ing adventure here.
