NaNoWriMo: Lessons from National Novel Writing Month

I wrote 50k words of garbage so you don't have to

I love the idea of NanoWriMo, don’t get me wrong.

If you’re unfamiliar with National Novel Writing Month, the goal is simple, if not fairly ambitious: write 50k words in November. They don’t have to be good words. In fact, they probably won’t be. The idea is just to get you into the habit of writing daily and, in my case, get the worst ideas out of you.

A little background: In September, I completed my first novel (yay!) and embarked on the querying process (😩) alternating between crushing self-defeat and celebratory dances. However, in October I decided to pause querying and undergo another revision, this time with a developmental editor. I sent the revised manuscript to my editor in late October and am currently waiting.

Writing is lots and lots of waiting.

So I needed something to take my mind off all of that. I decided 50k words in 30 days (22 days if you eliminate weekends) wasn’t grueling enough, and set a goal of 60k words for myself instead. A lofty goal, considering I had, at best, a half-baked idea.

Instead, I ended with 50,488 words, of which I’d reckon about 10k are good. Maybe less.

So I “won” NanoWriMo.

But if I’m honest, I don’t feel very good about it. There were days I hammered away for hours at plot lines that made no sense, characters that bored me, and scenes that even I did not care about.

So what did I really win here? As it turns out, quite a lot.

My idea really wasn’t any good

Look, it felt good. It even sounded good out loud. Those hours I spent pumping myself up about it in my car, listening to music that brought back memories of the stories I wanted to tell, I felt invested.

For someone who has always loved to write but struggled with ideas, it felt incredible to have just finished my first novel and already have another idea right there, just waiting to be hatched. I nearly put aside my first novel in the editing stage to work on this. That’s how promising it felt.

Somehow, when I sat down to write it, something just…broke. It’s like all the promise I’d felt when it was just an idea had suddenly vanished.

Part of me thinks this is because the idea was never really there to begin with, and I think that’s partially true. I had an idea, but that’s not the same as having a story.

The other part of me? Well, I blame the outline.

I tried to be a Plotter—and it killed my creativity

With my first novel, I felt like I wasted a lot of time. I spent four months writing a completely different story than the one I ended up with. When I finally realized the story I actually wanted to tell, it only took me six months to finish the (initial) final draft of the book. I thought if I could just figure out my new story through plotting, rather than writing my way into it like I did the first time, I could save some time, right?

Wrong.

It turns out, I really am a pantser through and through. Which is weird because in every other area of my life I’m a plotter. I need to know what we’re having for dinner before I get out of bed. I need to know the weekend plans by Wednesday afternoon latest. I eat a Peppermint Patty at the same time every night when our dog gets his after-dinner dessert.

Everything is set and organized and it makes sense.

But with writing, it just….doesn’t work.

When I tried plotting, it took all of the magic out of it for me. Instead of feeling free to write, I felt constrained, and bored, like my characters were simply actors on a stage, like if you bumped into the set pieces just the right way, the whole thing would come crumbling down.

I think I need to be able to write my way into the story, to discover through the writing itself. It’s more time-consuming but, it’s a lot more fun.

Writing for the market is a bad idea if you aren’t in love with that market

I wanted my second novel to be a romance novel. There were a lot of reasons for this: candidly, a big part of it was marketability and the desire to create something that agents, editors, and readers would love as much as I did. My first novel is Women’s Fiction, and the querying process has been brutal. It has been ups and downs and hope and stress and everything all the time. I know it’s tough out there. I know agents need a sure thing right now. That there is so little room for even the most understandable and mundane imperfections.

But I’d be lying if I said this new fear didn’t have a significant impact on me when I sat down to write novel number two.

Plus, I really am one of those (really annoying, I’m so sorry) people who believes in love and happily ever afters and grandiose gestures.

When I was fifteen I broke up with my boyfriend by quoting Carrie Bradshaw at him, screaming through the phone:

“I'm someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love!”

I even said it with the same cadence you just read it in because yes I have watched that scene a hundred times and no, he did not get it. Which was also sort of the point.

So yeah. That’s me.

But I don’t know—when I sat down to write, I just didn’t fall in love with it.

Even though I’m a romantic.

Even though I like romance novels.

Even though I’ve had Hallmark on in the background ALL DAY and it has been on ALL DAY EVERY DAY for MONTHS.

Do you know there is not one but TWO Hallmark movies set in Garland, Alaska? Because I do!

Somehow though, writing a romance novel didn’t feel the same as I thought it would. It wasn’t like watching a Hallmark movie and it wasn’t like reading The Unhoneymooners.

So I don’t think this will be a romance novel. It will have heavy romance. It will feel in parts like the Hallmark movies I so love (I hope). It might even make you swoon. But I think, for now, it’s shifting gears back to where my heart is, that messy line between commercial and literary and self-reflection and complication.

It’s what I feel good at.

I’m glad I challenged myself to write outside a genre I normally would, but like any real romance, (sorry, I had to) it’s just shown me where my heart really is, and that’s back with Women’s Fiction and the pain of figuring out who you are.

Changing POV helped

This was perhaps one of the most unexpected discoveries of NanoWriMo.

Around the 35k mark of my NaNoWriMo journey, I thought to myself, “Hey. Maybe this would suck less if it was in third person.”

And you know what?

It really did!

My first novel is written entirely in first-person, which was the perfect POV for it, but it had actually started in third! After struggling with it, I switched to first person on a whim to see if it felt more natural, which of course it did. So it’s kind of funny that I ran into the opposite problem here.

Maybe it’s my naïveté as a writer (it definitely is) but I always assumed POV was more about writer preference. It turns out, that’s not true at all. It’s more about the right POV for the story.

With about a week and change to spare on NaNoWriMo I decided to switch from first to third POV and instantly the whole thing flowed better. It didn’t necessarily give me clarity on the plot or clue me in on what the point of the story was at all, but it did flow better and I did start to like and understand my characters.

For the first time in weeks, I started to feel happy with the quality of my writing.

Pantsers gonna Pants

I don’t know if I believe there was one fatal flaw (get it?) to my struggle with NanoWriNo but if I had to blame one thing it would be this.

I tried to outline this book.

As I mentioned, with my first novel it took me four months of writing a completely different story to get to the heart of what I really wanted to say. The process was eye-opening, thrilling, and fun. I truly had a blast along the way.

This time around, I got in my head. Instead of just writing because I love it and wanted to have fun, I started treating it like a job. 😱😱😱

Which, I hope for it to one day be, but that doesn’t mean I need to suck the joy out of it by outlining and planning and squeezing all the magic out of it.

By outlining, I was trying to expedite the process by having some idea of where I was going, which is great in theory but not in practice. (For me) All I really did was ruin the story for myself. Instead of giving me the freedom to write scenes, it gave me lifeless characters and dull plot lines.

I think, for me, for this story, plotting was a huge mistake.

I had a creative writing professor in college who used to always say that:

“If you know the ending, your readers will too.”

I always loved that. I know this is highly individual and everyone’s process is so different, but for me, I think this is something I need to stick to. The more I researched, planned, and mapped things out (something that, as a small business owner and chronic organizer is central to me) the less I enjoyed writing and the more my story just felt boring.

For me, I think pantsing is the only way. Even if it does mean four months of writing just to figure out what I’m trying to say.

It’s still a great way to learn and build your community

It’s not NaNoWriMo’s fault that my idea sucked or that I couldn’t string a sentence I was passionate about together. That’s on me. I was coming off six months of living inside a story I was in LOVE with, characters I understood and adored and felt excited about.

Working on my first novel was like living inside a fever dream and stepping away from it was heartbreaking. I needed something to distract myself and working on a new project made the most sense.

After all, I love writing, and the timing with NanoWriMo couldn’t have been better.

It’s not easy to come off that kind of intensity and step into something else, especially when it’s a genre you’re not as familiar with and you’re making yourself crazy over query rejections and waiting to hear back and “Is this going to be enough?”

What it did though, is it sent me into overdrive. I started reaching out to other writers. I started listening to a podcast that’s already been so valuable (The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, if you’re curious), looking into writing workshops in Boston, just trying to get a sense of where my community might be.

I haven’t quite found it yet but, NanoWriMo got me paying attention. Connecting. It also got me closer to understanding the story I was trying to tell (and the one I’m not. I have to be grateful for that

So where did I land?

I don’t know; your guess is as good as mine. One thing I’m sure of though is that I’m going to keep writing this book, for now. It’s an absolute mess with maybe 10k-20k salvageable words, but I’m slowly getting closer to the story I want to tell. Just yesterday I wrote a scene with a character I’d never imagined until she popped out on the page, and I don’t know if that will go anywhere, if I’ll erase it, delete her, scrap the whole idea.

I just know that I really, really love writing. And that I’m good at it — even if this Substack stream of conscious mess isn’t the best representation of that.

Writing a novel is painstaking work, and I’m not even in the submission phase or the publishing phase or even the has an agent phase, and already I’ve spent more time than I could ever count writing and revising, editing in a painstaking way to get the sentences just right, the words jumping off the page in a way that grabs readers, in timeline checks and gut checks and all the things.

But I love it.

I’m going to send off with one of my absolute favorite quotes for the creative industry. A little dramatic, a little nuts, but also kind of perfect.

Maisel: Do you love it?

Lenny Bruce : Do I love what?

Maisel : Comedy. Stand-up. Do you love it?

Lenny Bruce : Well, I've been doing it awhile. Ok, let's put it like this: If there was anything else in the entire world that I could possibly do to earn a living, I would. Anything! I'm talking dry cleaners to the Klan, crippled kid portrait painters, slaughterhouse attendant. If someone said to me, "Leonard, you can either eat a guy's head, or do two weeks at the Copa," I'd say "Pass the fucking salt." It's a terrible, terrible job. It should not exist. Like cancer. And God.

Maisel : But do you love it?

[Lenny shrugs, grins, and walks away still looking at her] 

Maisel : Yeah. He loves it.