I Published My NaNo-Novel: Drawing the Map to New Horizons

We love talking to Wrimos who’ve published their NaNoWriMo projects and asking them how they got there. Today, Jenny D. Williams author of the novel Atlas of Forgotten Places , shares her story of how her NaNo draft inspired ideas that would make their way into many other works.:

The first year I did NaNoWriMo, I was living in East Africa, volunteering with a humanitarian organization in Uganda and southern Sudan. I’d been writing about the region for half a year already in the form of grant applications, emergency funding requests, and project reports. I wrote about things that could be measured: dollars spent, blankets distributed, wells drilled, refugees supported.

The work was necessary—and narrow. What of the things beyond measurement? What of the smell of dusk, the intimacy of another passenger’s skin pressed warmly against yours in a packed minibus? What of the sociopolitical quagmire of the northern Ugandan conflict, so vastly more complex than the 30-second sound bites that reached Western audiences?

Unsettling questions of aid work and responsibility coiled like snakes in my stomach. I longed to wrestle with these uncertainties on the page—the grit, the guilt, the grace. I needed more than a few paragraphs in a newsletter or a matrix in a budget report. I needed a looser structure, uncharted imaginative space.

50,000 words of fiction sounded just right.

That November, I hauled my laptop on bumpy bus rides to remote field offices all over Uganda and across the northern border to a region whose stamp in my passport read “New Sudan.” I have vivid memories of my room in Ikotos, in a compound that also housed bomb shelters used during the war, where I stayed up long after the generator was turned off, racing against the dwindling laptop battery to meet my daily word count.

It was energizing. It was exhilarating.

It was a terrible novel.

But it was a start.

The experience of writing that NaNo novel—as halting and insufficient as the final product was—had opened a new space in me. For years, I returned to the ideas of that manuscript again and again in the form of short stories, poems, essays, and a graphic novel. When, half a decade after I left Uganda, I finished my MFA and moved to Germany, I gave myself a year to write a complete novel draft. I wanted to take my time. Go slow. I was ready for that, now.

I didn’t reread the NaNo file; I didn’t need to. Its purpose was fulfilled. As Jane Smiley writes:

“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence.”

Though the characters and story transformed radically before finding their final form in The Atlas of Forgotten Places, it was the original NaNo novel that gave me a taste of the vast, wild territory of novel writing, and the confidence to see a project through.

Today, eleven years after that NaNo novel began, Atlas is on the map—it’s named and categorized, its borders drawn—and I find myself restless and searching. A new novel glints on the horizon. A new continent of here be monsters.

A new November, here I come.

Jenny D. Williams has lived and worked in the U.S., Germany, and Uganda. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and a BA from UC Berkeley. Her award-winning fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and illustrations have been published or are forthcoming in The Sun Magazine, Vela, Ethical Traveler, and Michigan Quarterly Review as well as several anthologies. A former Teachers & Writers Collaborative fellow and recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant for emerging writers, she currently lives in Seattle with her husband and dog. The Atlas of Forgotten Places is her first novel. Find her on Instagram @stateofwander and on Facebook.