Welcome writers to every novel writer’s favorite and/or least favorite month of the year: November. It’s our most favorite because it’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which we look forward to all year. It’s also our least favorite month because, again, it’s NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo is like a marathon but for your brain and it goes on all month. Or perhaps like an ultramarathon, meaning a footrace longer than the standard 26.2 miles of a marathon, which is already an absolutely insane amount of running. The longest ultramarathon seems to be the Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, name self-explanatory, which takes literally weeks to complete with runners running from six in the morning till midnight every day, stopping only to eat, sleep, and care for their feet.
That sounds terrible, and it probably is. I can’t say I like the idea of doing NaNoWriMo but if someone held a gun to my head and said I had to do it, I could do it. If someone told me to run 3,100 miles in six weeks I would simply choose death. And not just faced with 3,100 miles of running. I would probably choose death if I had to sprint a quarter mile to escape a zombie. I absolutely hate running. But there are people who like it and do it even if their lives do not depend on it.
Frankly, the marathon runners probably have their own newsletter somewhere that is, at this very moment, talking about how if someone told them to write an entire novel in a month they’d probably choose death instead. This is a principle called perspective.
Shelf Life has completed three full years in publication and is off on its fourth year—this is the fourth NaNoWriMo since Shelf Life’s inception in September 2020—but the first time I am writing at any length about NaNoWriMo, which seems like an oversight but isn’t, really. I spend all of November plus a good bit of October actively trying to forget about the existence of NaNoWriMo because thinking about it at all is very stressful.
Today I’m going for it. All about NaNoWriMo, not quite in time for you to start if you haven’t already, but perhaps next year.
NaNoWriMo began in July 1999. That was right after I graduated from high school, so, an entire adult lifetime ago for me, and also a period during which the internet was in its infancy. As a result, the word didn’t start getting out about NaNo—and it didn’t start getting big—till much later. It was started by one guy and had only a handful of participants the first year. It moved to November in 2000, and has been in November ever since.
The idea is simple: Participants commit to writing a novel-length work in one month’s time. For the purposes of modern NaNo, this means 50,000 words. Although the concept is to write an entire novel, many participants find themselves at the 50,000-word mark (or higher) on November 30 but with their story still incomplete. These folks still win NaNo. Since NaNo is a challenge to oneself, many people complete, or “win,” NaNo with 50,000 words of something other than “a complete novel”—a screenplay, a memoir, a work of nonfiction, part of a novel, a collection of short stories, or whatever. There are no NaNo police. November has 30 days so writers commit to writing 1,667 words, on average, per day.
After a few years, the word got out about NaNo and the program found itself with a growing number of registrants each year. In 2005, NaNoWriMo became a registered nonprofit organization. More than 400,000 writers participated in 2022, and it’s no longer “national” in a meaningful sense anymore, by the way—participants hail from 671 regions across six continents, according to the NaNo site. About 12.5 percent of participants were NaNo winners in 2022. The percent of winners typically hovers in the neighborhood of 10 percent of all participants.
Just as an experienced, top-condition runner may have no trouble running 26.2 miles in a day (a marathon), running that same distance every day for a month is much harder. (There was one guy who did it every day for a year so it is possible in practice.) NaNoWriMo is a little like that. Many people—even those who rarely write at length—can write 1,667 words in a day when they are really inspired and motivated, but it’s considerably harder to keep that same pace day after day for 30 days.
To put this in perspective, I write somewhere around 20,000 words per month, on average, for Shelf Life, and Shelf Life articles (which are always completed in a single writing session) average somewhere around 2,200 words apiece. I can sit down and write 2,000 words in a couple hours anytime I want without sweating it too much. NaNo means doing essentially that much every day for a month, which can be rough. I have failed NaNo several times.
The rules of NaNoWriMo, as they exist at present, are these:
Writing begins at 12:00:01 am on November 1 and ends at 11:59:59 pm on November 30.
The challenge may not be started early and must be completed within the 30 days.
Manuscripts must reach a minimum of 50,000 words to win.
Planning and preparation are allowed to begin before the start time, but no material written before 12:00:01 am on November 1 may be included in the manuscript.
There are no restrictions on novel genre, format, or content, and may be written in any language.
The rules are deliberately kept simple to encourage writers—especially new writers—to participate, rather than to discourage anyone. NaNo is discouraging enough as it is.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have never completed a NaNo project. However, I did once write a 70,000ish-word manuscript—a completed novel—in three weeks. In principle, I’ve done the thing. I’ve never done it during November. I don’t intend to ever do it again. Were any of those 70,000ish words good? Some of the individual words might be good but the order I put them in was fairly crummy. This is not a self-deprecatory comment; I think first drafts should be crummy. The work is there if I ever get around to revising it into something palatable, I just haven’t yet.
NaNo is a great motivator to get folks to start writing. It’s a fresh start at the beginning of the month. There’s community, there are others to help you stay accountable, and there are many success stories. Here’s a list of eight bestselling novels written during NaNoWriMo. Hundreds of books written during NaNo have gone on to be traditionally published.
Modern NaNoWriMo has grown into a whole production. The NaNo website is robust. Registered users have a dashboard that tracks their goals and progress; users can connect as “buddies” to encourage each other, there are writing groups to join (or you can create your own), and there’s a whole NaNo resource hub. October has been rebranded as “Preptober,” the month during which you prepare for NaNo. Camp NaNo takes place in April and July, and offers a lower-pressure, more flexible challenge wherein users set their own goal. During Camp NaNo, participants might revise or edit, drafts something new, or finish something they have sitting around (one of the camp tracks is NaNoFinMo, or National Novel Finishing Month).
NaNo can be a great motivator for some and a great demotivator for others. I know I’m not alone in this because I’ve had the same discussion multiple times, with many writer friends: NaNo, by design, applies a lot of pressure and not everyone does their best creative work, or enjoys doing creative work at all, under a lot of pressure. While the community participation aspect of NaNo is one of its strengths, it presents challenges, too. It can be tough to see others making their goals if you’re not making your own.
While I like the idea of NaNo as a fun challenge for those who are prepared and have realistic expectations, I think about how I’d feel if I were a new or developing writer, and participated to write my first longform work, and did not succeed. Just as I wouldn’t expect someone to show up fresh off the couch, unused to running, and successfully run a marathon, I don’t think anyone should come away on December 1 feeling like they failed at writing a book if they did not complete 50,000 words. NaNo an the extreme sport of writing.
Sometimes in life an endeavor doesn’t succeed but it doesn’t fail either. Success and failure are not the only two outcomes. Or maybe I should put it this way: Lots of people view anything short of complete success as a failure. Instead, it’s helpful to view anything short of complete failure as a success. For instance: Attempted NaNo and wrote 20,000 words? That’s 20,000 more words than you had on October 31. Success.
I once told a friend I was kind of sad that I had “given up” on roller derby without becoming successful at it. She pointed out that in the year or so I participated I:
Learned to skate, as an adult, having not done so since I was a child.
Participated in six months of training.
Learned the rules of the sport well enough to officiate bouts.
Tried out for and made a team.
Participated in bouts that were held to entertain the public; people paid money for tickets to see bouts I played.
To her, that sounded like a successful run at roller derby. What would have felt like “success” to me? Making a better team? Becoming team captain? League president? Being in Sports Illustrated? I didn’t have a good vision of success was so I just assumed I failed when I stopped. Sometimes you stop doing something and it’s just over. Not everything that ends has failed.
Anyway, NaNoWriMo has extremely clearcut success conditions, which is something I appreciate generally. However, there is a lot of room to be impressed with one’s NaNo performance even if one does not complete the official success criteria.
To wrap up this NaNo talk, I guess I’m neither in favor of NaNo or opposed. To each their own. I probably will not participate in the future because November is just an awful month for me to set aside that amount of time. I always travel for Thanksgiving, I host a big party right at the beginning of November that takes up a lot of time planning (heck, Fallapalooza is tomorrow!), and I have to sign and mail about 10,000 holiday cards because I am blessed with many excellent friends.
But I do like the idea of motivational challenges. If NaNo seems appealing but your November sucks for you, you can always set your own challenge for another, more favorable month, or participate in one of the Camp NaNos in the spring or summer.
The best way to get a novel written, in my opinion, is not to participate in a challenge but to build a solid writing habit. A challenge like NaNo is a great motivator to begin but a well-formed habit will keep you writing day after day and year after year.
If writing cadence and pace is on your mind, as it is for many of us when NaNo is in the air, check out Pacemaker Planner. I love this tool for planning out the pace of many types of projects to finish by a deadline. It has a lot of options for strategy (eg, do the same amount each day? Do a little more each day? Oscillate between lighter and heavier days?) and intensity, and lets you customize whether you do more on weekends, less on weekends, or nothing on weekends (yay for weekends off). It’s set up to track writing and writing-related tasks but can also be used to track crafting, reading, studying, saving money, or even watching TV.
It will even track your running for you if you want.
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