I failed Nanowrimo: Here’s what I learned instead
Lessons learned along the way to that elusive 50,000-word project, and some things I am doing better for next year.
Like many others, I spent this month trying to write every day and trying to reach the same goal as everyone doing National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo): 50,000 words of something. I ended up reaching 30,000 words. That’s Day 18, in terms of word count, which means that at the end of 30 days, I only managed to succeed for 18 days.
In other words, I failed Nanowrimo.
When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time agonizing and kicking myself for failing at anything. Usually, the sulking took days. Now that I’m older, I know better than waste my time sulking, but I also now know exactly what that was about — that was me trying to extract something useful from the whole exercise, albeit with unnecessary emotions.
So, this is me now trying my best to distill a few lessons from this failure, minus the sulking. I hope that I will remember to look at this before heading into Nano season next year, because of course, I will try again.
My Nanowrimo ’17 post-mortem
Writing is still hard. So come to the page however you want — just never lightly (or so Stephen King says)
There’s really no way around it — writing is hard. Even people who do it for a living find it hard. Even people who have finished Nano before still struggle with it. The weight of the 50,000-word count is always an added pressure. Throughout November, I had this little floating sticky note on my screen that contained my writing targets.
It stopped at the Day 18 target: 30,006. I’m not really a believer in word count, but as this was the most important metric of the exercise, I respected it. More than that, I respected the hard work it entailed: You really had to show up every single day. It didn’t matter if you were nervous or anxious or hungry. Writing is hard, but you have to do it anyway.
I think Stephen King sums this up well in On Writing:
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
You have to write every day.
Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes anybody doing Nano can make is to think they can catch up with their word counts during the weekends. This is actually an understandable plan of action — many of us have work on weekdays, and on those days we can feel so exhausted and unable to write. I felt this too, many times along the way during this journey.
I failed to reach the Nanowrimo word count, and this is in part because I failed to write every day.
I believe the way I did Nano this year was actually less about the word count, and more about that everyday commitment to come to the page. In the end, what mattered more was that I hit some sort of daily commitment target than a wholesale target, if this makes sense.
Perhaps this is just me and my personality getting through: I don’t work well with just seeing One Big Target; it really matters to me that this target is broken down systematically, that I can identify milestones clearly. And since Nano was a month-long effort, daily word count milestones worked best.
And since there were days when I failed to hit my daily target, it was difficult to succeed with the effort on the whole.
You really need a plan.
In the past I just approached Nano all gung-ho, showing up on Nov. 1 and thinking, Well, here goes! I suppose some people can pull that off, but not me. On the one year I succeeded at Nano, I had it all mapped out and outlined. I realized that I was the sort of writer who needed something that would hold my thoughts together and keep myself in line throughout the project duration — what agreements about the characters have I made with myself? What decisions about the plot have I decided on?
One of the most enjoyable things about writing is creating something where literally anything can happen. However, many times I find this so enjoyable that I end up flailing in a sea full of choices. Sometimes, as is the inherent challenge of a long piece, the challenge is how to be consistent with previous choices I’ve made, and not introduce continuity/out of character errors just because “I felt like writing it” that way, that time.
So. Planning is important. Knowing who your characters are, where they’re coming from, where they’re going — all of that is important. For this year, I tried using Evernote’s writing templates to keep all of my notes in one place. It worked splendidly — thank you Evernote!
Additional super informative reading: Simon Lund Larsen’s analysis of the structure of popular Hollywood screenplays and how they can be used in outlining stories:
So yes, I planned content. But Nanowrimo’s metric isn’t content quality — it is word count. So my planning error is that I planned for content without tying it up to the sole metric that exists: Word count.
A revision in next year’s battle plan: You need a plot plan AND a word count plan
Having a plot plan worked really well for me — I knew who my characters were and where they were coming from, so it was easier for me to write up scenarios that made sense for them. Whenever I stopped for the night and resumed in the morning, I just had to open the writing document and the master plan, and that kept my world in order.
However, I come from a place where the word count isn’t really a plus — an old-school journalism and news research background meant that there were some old writing habits that have been hardcoded in my brain after spending a good decade or so in the newsroom. This meant that I preferred to write things in 100 words, even if I could do so in 250.
So when I realized that I have finished writing through more than half of my outline in only 10,000 words, I panicked. I tried lengthening the segments after that, but it was a joyless exercise. That’s also a factor as to why I am right here, stuck in Day 18.
I planned the content, and went happily about it, only to realize that I hadn’t been mindful of the target. On the one side, maybe I was writing a story that was best told in 20,000 words. But then again, who’s to say some portions couldn’t be made better by more vivid storytelling?
Next year, I’m planning more thoughtfully by not just asking myself about who the characters are, and what their journeys are going to be like — I’ll ask more questions: What part of this journey can benefit with more vivid storytelling? Which parts of the story can be made better if I listen to the characters more and let them speak more?
Things that must constantly be managed: Distractions, energy, sleep
These days, we must always be aware of these precious resources that must be guarded: Time, energy and attention.
That time is limited is a given. If you have a regular 8–5 and the usual deadlines and deliverables, it would make sense that your writing time options would be limited to the hours outside of work and maybe your lunch hour.
Energy and attention are two other limited things that are closely tied together. We spend so much of ourselves throughout the day, trying to best allocate our attention between work, our families, ourselves. It is acceptable to feel exhausted at the end of our shifts.
To last throughout Nanowrimo — hell, to stay sane and productive throughout the month — I realized that to manage these three resources, I had to do two things better: Minimize distractions and get some sleep.
Yes, sleep.
For the longest time, I have considered myself to be a night writer — after all, I spent much of it working mid-shift at the newspaper, which ran for nine hours starting noon. With this schedule, I usually wrote after shift until a bit past midnight, slept, then woke up at past 8, wrote again, then reported for work before noon.
When I shifted to a corporate 8–5 schedule this year, some adjustments had to be made. For starters, I could no longer write at night because I had to wake up early. So I tried doing something I never thought I could ever do: I wrote as soon as I woke up, before I got ready for work.
This meant getting up at a godawful hour when the bed was still so nice, and it was still dark outside. I think it’s a lot like vegetables — it’s theoretically supposedly good for you, but is so hard to love. Haha.
But here are some things I have observed about me, my new setup and my new energy levels:
- Writing after work is often futile because my brain is already offline. Best to use this time to read and make notes for writing — not writing per se.
- In the morning, all I have to do is get to that first glass of water, and through the first 100 words. It’s easier from then on — and all of this, before caffeine! Astounding.
- I write better when I sleep for at least 7 hours. Which means it’s still better to sleep at 10 and wake at 5 and write, than to try desperately to get some writing done after 10 (I end up just playing Adventure Capitalist) and end up just sleeping from 12 to 6, which means my morning writing energy will also be lacking.
Some tips to myself for Nano ’18
Drink water first thing in the morning. It sets the tone for the rest of the day. To ensure this, make it a point to set a fresh glass of water by a bedside table before sleeping. Best lifehack learned and executed this year.
Sleep enough. No more trying to pull all-nighters. As we get older, we have to take better care of our bodies, and part of that is letting ourselves sleep enough.
Take Nano prep more seriously. And plan more thoroughly by planning your word count alongside your plot direction.
End notes
Thirty thousand words and 95 pages is a decent output — don’t be too hard on yourself. Mourn it, then dust it off, edit it and publish it. People are waiting. Moving forward — focus better. Maybe lessen the caffeine and the sugar. And remember: Life goes on outside of Nanowrimo. Weekend write-ins are fantastic, but don’t forget to do the laundry if you don’t want to run out of undies :)
