My Marathon NaNoWriMo Sprint
aka, you will never best me, Donald Trump
November, 2014, I was planning a move across the country. Finding myself jobless for six weeks (an experience I haven’t had since I graduated college), I was a bit unmoored. I’m a doer. I’m active. I don’t like vacations where you sit around. I don’t like to be idle. It makes me go a bit nutty.
One of my best friends, bless her heart, asked me to participate in NaNoWriMo with her.
Write 50,000 words in 30 days, while planning a cross-country move?
Sign. Me. Up.
Every day of that November in 2014, I drove my husband to work and then parked myself in a coffee shop for a couple hours. I spent my hours in the coffee shop planning our move and writing, and by the time we started our drive on November 28, I had a novel (albeit a bad one) stashed in my Google Drive.
Working at Medium has a lot of benefits. One of my personal favorites is the fact that I am now friends with someone who is on the NaNoWriMo board. I’m basically besties with a celebrity, in my humble opinion, and I get to talk with her about writing whenever I want, ask her to read thing without feeling crushing self-doubt, and, most amazingly, guest-write a post in the NaNoWriMo publication.
November, 2016, I found myself moving again. This time, it was across the street and not across the country, but any kind of move still requires boxing all your stuff and then unboxing it again. On top of that, I had a full-time job and was cycling six days a week. (The downside of being friends with someone on the board of NaNoWriMo is that you kind of feel obligated to do NaNoWriMo, no matter how busy you are.) So, once more, I signed up to write myself a new novel.
Things started well for me. I wrote on airplanes, between speaking events and other work trips, during lunch, in the morning, before work. I was humming along, averaging almost 3,000 words a day.
And then Donald Trump won the presidency.
My writing fell off a cliff. Because, at the end of the day, the worst thing that I could imagine had happened to my country and perhaps my own personal liberties, but I still had to get up in the morning, unpack my house, go to work, and cycle every day. I still had to live my life.
And so, my NaNoWriMo writing didn’t happen.
Here’s the beautiful thing about NaNoWriMo: Winning means nothing except for what matters to you.
The night before the deadline, I was lamenting the fact I was nearly 13,000 words to write, and Julie said simply to me, “you still have 37,000 words more than you had on October 31st. That’s something.”
And she was right.
I’m not the kind of person that likes to lose — especially not when it comes to personal goals I set for myself. I did just say that despite the fact Trump became our President-elect and I felt like my world was falling apart, I still had to cycle six days a week. Most people wouldn’t really count that as a must-do like eating, bathing, and keeping a job. But I challenged myself to train and get on a competitive team next spring, so cycling is just a necessary as breathing for me. I set a goal for myself, and god help me, I’m going to do it.
With 107 minutes left to go before NaNoWriMo ended and December began, I logged 50,812 words into my personal dashboard.
My story isn’t over yet; I have about 30,000 more words to write before I think the first draft of this novel is done. And my fingers are definitely sore from that manic sprint the last couple days of November, so I’m grateful to the fact that I can bang out 1,000 or 2,000 instead of 13,000 in an evening.
But I’m going to do it — I’m going to finish that story.
And while I’m not sure I’ll have a cohesive piece I am yearning to tell for NaNoWriMo 2017, I’m still going to take part, because writing is a muscle, and working it out is the best thing a writer can do.
