How I Wrote a Novel in 15 Days

If you follow this blog, you know I’ve been participating in the month-long write-a-thon known as National Novel Writing Month, AKA NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1st and 30th. Silly as it seems, it is an international event with upwards of 200,000 people participating.

Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Brian Gresko recently dissed it on The Huffington Post. “National Novel Writing Month doesn’t celebrate the practice of writing a novel so much as it takes a dump on it,” he wrote. “Would-be novelist, expect more of yourself.” A number of commentators suggested Gresko lighten up, and some said he was just being “snooty.” But Gresko’s sentiments were exactly what I felt when, after ten days of slogging through an unreadable novel, I hit the wall.

Overnight, my enthusiasm turned to fatigue. What had started as fun now felt like the literary version of water boarding. NaNoWriMo was eating up my time, interfering with my sleep, and taking me away from my work—including the real novel I’ve been laboring over for months. I have blogs to write. Papers to grade. Music to play. My ongoing war with the resident dust bunnies. Instead, I was slopping through a slapdash collection of poorly integrated chapters in order to make an arbitrary word count in a pointless writing exercise. I began to wonder if NaNoWriMo was just a way to pretend I was writing, when I was actually avoiding writing. And, judging by the number of pep-talk emails NaNoWriMo Central deluged participants with, I wasn’t the only one.

Still, I didn’t want to quit. I’d committed to completing. And I’d gone and told everyone I was doing it, so if I quit, they’d all know. I fought with myself for a couple of days. And then I faced the dilemma the way I face going to the dentist: I got it over with.

I wrote like a madwoman. Over breakfast. Before my classes. While my dinner was bubbling on the stove, and late at night when I should have been curled up next to my slumbering husband. Every time I felt my enthusiasm sink, I reinvigorated it by calculating how many words I’d written and how many I had left. I reminded myself of how cool I’d feel when I could say I’d completed the challenge.

And I did it. November 15th—half way through the month—I logged my 50,000 words onto the NaNoWriMo website. Fifty thousand and ten, to be exact. And I decided that the experience had been worth it.

What I didn’t get out of NaNoWriMo: a publishable novel. For that matter, a publishable sentence.

Here’s what I did get:

Some good raw material. A few interesting ideas are sprinkled throughout my NaNoWriMo novel. A snappy phrase occasionally glimmers in the muddy prose. Who knows what I can do with these small miracles?

A plot. Or at least, the skeleton of a plot. The basic idea of the novel is pretty good, and the narrative took some interesting turns. Someday, I just might see what I can do with that story.

A stronger writing process. NaNoWriMo cuts through the headcrap that plagues writers: The doubts, the perfectionism, the false notion that you can’t write without inspiration. It forced me to write without waiting around for the perfect idea or the brilliant phrase. It made me think fast, come up with material on the spur of the moment, and get my words down on the page before my mental editor could tell me they weren’t any good.

Would I do it again? I’m not sure. Talk to me next Oct. 31st. But I’d advise anyone who writes seriously to give NaNoWriMo a go once in their life. If nothing else, it will remind you of one important fact: that the essence of writing—and the hardest part—is simply getting those words onto the page.