November 30, 2022
Week 112
Emotional State: Celebrating all the wins
NanoWrimo
I “won” Nanowrimo. The reason I put won in quotations is that for me, Nanowrimo isn’t something you win. Instead, it’s a challenge you undertake to push yourself and see just how much you can do when your feet are to the fire. You can’t fail at Nano, but you can write less than you expect.
Okay, so you don’t get the winner goodies or the fancy certificate, but any month where you get words on the page is a win in my book. And I rose to meet that challenge and smashed it. I have to say, I was a bit worried I couldn’t get back into it. That I’d lost my ability to get my butt in the chair and write every day or as many every days as I could.
I did it. I spent almost every day after my move and my stepkid’s arrival writing either in the morning or at night. Sometimes both. The muse took over. But the best part is that I enjoyed myself. I remembered why writing is the thing I most like to do, why it feeds my soul, and why I’m doing it.
And that is the ultimate “win” for Nanowrimo. Whether it is to remind us we love wrestling our slippery characters to the ground and torturing them, creating new worlds in our heads, exploring relationships way past what we expected, or just the simple pleasure of focusing on the words in front of us, the simple pleasure of writing can be reignited in November (or any time, really).
Nanowrimo is a real time experience of a slice of the writing life. Those moments where we need to get words, any words, down on the page to get the story out. Or skip scenes that are blocking us from moving forward. Or create new characters we never expected to introduce into the book’s world. It boils down to one thing: butt in chair, words on screen/paper.
For some, though, it becomes a hurdle, an obstacle, a 1000 ton weight pressing down on you that makes creating impossible. For those writers, I say you’re looking at it wrong. Rather than feel you have to write 50,000 words, instead challenge yourself to see how many words you can write, even if it’s only 15,000 or less.
Because those 15,000 words get you closer to finishing your story. Sitting down to write them may lead you to want to do it more often, which gets your book done quicker than if you’d never attempted it in the first place.
More books written mean more books to read, which makes us all winners.
Okay, so maybe I did win at Nanowrimo. But so did everyone else who wrote something, anything, in November.
And that’s something to celebrate.