Pro Tips from a NaNo Coach: It’s Never Too Late

NaNoWriMo can seem like a daunting task sometimes, for NaNo newbies and veterans alike. Fortunately, our NaNo Coaches are here to help guide you through November! Today, author Roseanne A. Brown is here to share some advice on getting started and catching up:

Stop me if this feels familiar: 

November 1st: It’s the first day of NaNoWriMo and you are PUMPED! Your playlists are playing! Your aesthetics are inspiring! By noon, you’ve hit that magic number—1667—and by the afternoon, you’re several hundred words past it! This! Is! Your! Year! 

November 2nd: Okay, not as many words as yesterday, but you’re still on track, and you’re still feeling good! You’ve got this! 

November 5th: You really, really want to write today but the dog needs a walk/the spouse needs a ride to the airport/that assignment needs finishing/life is life-ing all over the place. Surely one day not writing won’t throw you off that much… 

November 11th/13th/mid-month-day-of-your-choice: ……Uh Oh. 

If you’re anything like me, more often than not your attempts to do NaNoWriMo look uncomfortably like the above. You begin the month with a flare of creativity and gusto, only to find yourself sitting on the ground two weeks later, sobbing into a bag of Doritos wondering where it all went wrong. Especially in 2020, when the first week of November felt like a clown car taped to a flaming carousel careening down a highway at 90 mph. 

It’s so easy to get caught up in the idea that because we missed a day or five of NaNo, there’s no point in continuing. Ah well, gave it the ol’ college try, better luck next year. But when I find myself in the mid-month slump, I always remember this quote by G.K Chesterton: 

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”

Yes, 50,000 words is the goal. But if the act of writing itself is worth anything at all—and it is, from the bottom of my heart, it is—then anything that gets you closer to that goal is worth something too. Even if all you can scrape together is 1000 words. 500 words. 100. 10. 

Because at the end of the day, writing a book isn’t about pushing out the absolute most words you possibly can every single moment of every single day. (If it is, then I have been doing this all wrong for years…) It’s about moving forward one page, one paragraph, one word at a time. And though we’d all love to have all the time in the world to write, life is full of so many other wonderful and frustrating and surprising and lovely things demanding our time. Not only that, we are living through a time of major upheaval, with the climate crisis, fascism, and systemic racism on the rise on a global level. To write anything at all under these conditions, especially as a marginalized writer, is itself an act of triumph. It’s saying that your existence and what you have to say means something in the face of others claiming it doesn’t. 

So you fell off the horse. Great. That means you were going somewhere to begin with. Tend to your wounds, get back on, and keep moving. The only way you won’t get there is if you stop.

Roseanne “Rosie” A. Brown was born in Kumasi, Ghana and immigrated to the wild jungles of central Maryland as a child. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a Bachelor’s in Journalism and was also a teaching assistant for the school’s Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House program. Her journalistic work has been featured by Voice of America among other outlets.

On the publishing side of things, she has worked as an editorial intern at Entangled Publishing. Rosie was a 2017 Pitch Wars mentee and 2018 Pitch Wars mentor. Rosie currently lives outside Washington D.C., where in her free time she can usually be found wandering the woods, making memes, or thinking about Star Wars. Rosie is represented by Quressa Robinson of Nelson Literary Agency.

Get in touch with Roseanne this week on the NaNoWriMo Twitter account!