Strap on Your Pom-Poms for NaNoWriMo

If you’ve been around NaNoWriMo for very long, you know that a big part of the appeal is the cheerleading. The writer stereotype is a lone, disheveled person sitting in front of a typewriter with a bottle of brown liquor in front of them and three dozen crumpled sheets of paper on the floor behind them. But then NaNo came along, and suddenly writers were dragged out into the light and given encouragement and vegetables. (Chocolate is a vegetable, right? RIGHT?)

Giving encouragement can be as easy as saying “good job” to the person who does something they’re proud of, but there are a few people in my life who have made encouragement into an art form.

The first is the brother of a boyfriend I had in high school. The first time I met him, I was nervous because my boyfriend idolized his brother and had built him up to be the most amazing person on earth. When I’m nervous, I can be snarky, and at the end of a day of hanging out, this guy said to me “You don’t like anything about me, do you?” From him I learned to find a thing I love about people and talk about it.

Next is my supervisor from my first job out of college. Our boss was, to put it nicely, an entitled selfish clueless jerk. My supervisor was great about acknowledging that truth while reminding us that it didn’t mean we could slack off on our jobs. From her I learned to help people take pride in their work, whether anyone else appreciated it or not.

Another boss had an amazing knack for assuming I could do anything. He would tell me what he wanted done, and when I asked questions, he would say things like “See? You got it! That’s brilliant!” It didn’t matter whether I did things right the first time or struggled with them, his response was always “I knew you’d do it!” From him I learned to let people know I believe in them right from the beginning.

Lastly, there’s my friend Cliff. I belonged to a critique group with Cliff for years, gathering at his house twice a month to talk about what we’d written. The meetings would always start with folks in the group saying “I got an agent,” or “I sold a story,” or “I have a book coming out,” and Cliff would celebrate with cake. He wasn’t just praising his friend’s hard work and good fortune — you could tell that Cliff was genuinely happy when something good happened to someone he knew. From him I learned that encouragement is a win-win. Every achievement proves that success is possible, and should give us all a reason to celebrate.

These people have stuck with me over the years, and the memory of their encouragement has pushed me over the finish line almost every November since 2002. We all need people like this in our lives, and maybe this is the year you go out and be that person. I have faith in you.

Allons-y!

Lise Quintana
NaNoWriMo participant since 2002, NaNoWriMo board member since 2019, otherwise kind of a goof-off