Keep Doing You: A Farewell from NaNo Intern Lena

Every year, there comes a point when we have to wish our amazing, talented interns good-bye as they move on to share their awesomeness with the rest of the world. As this blog will be going on hiatus for a couple of weeks over the holidays, it seemed only right to end the year on some excellent life advice from the wonderful Lena Heller, Intern Extraordinaire: 

Well, this is it.

I’m sitting in NaNo HQ on my very last day of this internship, in the very same spot I was on my very first day. But a lot has gone on in between that. And even that is a bit of an understatement.

When I tell people about the concept of NaNoWriMo, what they’re most intimidated by is the goal of 50,000 words. And I understand that. It’s a pretty big number, especially if you’ve never written a novel before. But I always assure them that’s not what NaNo is really about. It’s about writing for the sake of writing, rather than expecting a finished, polished work at the end. But I’m notoriously bad at taking my own advice.

At the beginning of this internship, I was very optimistic about everything, especially about winning NaNo. That didn’t exactly happen. And as the month went on and my wordcount fell more and more behind, I expected to feel worse and worse. But that isn’t what happened at all. Instead, I found myself part of a new club. This is a club of participants who aren’t hung up on that ominous 50,000. We’re happy with writing anything at all. I wrote 17,026 words during the month of November. And I’ve slowly realized that’s perfectly okay.

I’m really in awe of everyone who made that 50k mark, and especially those who surpassed it, but I’m out here representing the losers. We may have only written 100 words, or we may have written 49,999, but we still wrote. We participated in sprints and we added in dream sequences, but ultimately, we fell short. And that is more than just acceptable for us. We don’t care about a certificate or a t-shirt or a purple bar. We still have dynamic characters and witty dialogue and beautiful descriptions, and that’s enough for us. We don’t get easily discouraged, and we’ll definitely be back next year.

I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo for many years, and I’ve never won, but it wasn’t until this internship that I really realized the depth of this community. Although my internship title doesn’t have anything to do with that, interacting with the community has been what I’ve enjoyed most from being here. I loved being inspired by all of you and it’s truly a privilege to hopefully be able to inspire you, too.

I may only have 17,026 words, but out of that I’ve gained some great stories with a lot of potential. And more importantly, I’ve gained a lot of friends, wonderful advice, and hilarious anecdotes that will be worth even more to me in the years to come.

So this one is for the losers. Maybe we’ll win someday, and maybe we won’t, but ultimately, that won’t matter. Above all, keep doing you, and ignore the haters. And that’s just general life advice.

Lena Heller
Former Editorial Intern