Lessons from a Twenty-Year NaNoWriMo Run

What lessons have you learned during your experiences doing NaNoWriMo? Long-time participant Kathy Kitts shares some of the takeaways from her impressive twenty-year streak of writing novels: 

NaNoWriMo has always been an important part of my November, but this year it’s more so. It will mark my twentieth win in a row. (If I make it. No pressure.) 

When HQ found out about this big milestone, they asked me to describe the lessons learned over the years as a participant, Municipal Liaison (a.k.a. ML, a volunteer regional leader), ML mentor, site debugger, ML handbook contributor, fundraiser, translator, and occasional MOD. (If you stick around long enough, nonprofit organizations will always find something for you to do.) I agreed. Why? Because NaNoWriMo has had such a profound influence on me, it actually altered the direction of my life. 

2003 – The First Year. At the time, I was a planetary science postdoc and should have been concentrating on my research, but I was tired of writing about what is. I wanted to write about what if. Except, what if I failed? Taking no chances, I told no one. Under the name Apollo16, NaNoWriMo became my late-night secret. And I won! I donated out of gratitude and got a tiny little pin that read: I WRITE BOOKS. Nah! It was a fluke, a one-off. That “s” was a problem.

2004 – October Is For Preparation. This is when I learned about crockpots. You could make a bunch of soups and stews and freeze the leftovers. I won and treated myself to a chest freezer. You know, in case I tried for a third year. (And yes, that sucker is still running.)

2005 – The Magic of Write-ins. Being brave, I told a few friends about this November writing thingy, and we had our own unofficial write-in. I fetched my “I WRITE BOOKS” pin and wore it to our celebration party. Three was a big enough plural.

2006 – Cheap Halloween Candy and Perth, Australia. As a newly minted ML, I passed out pixy stix at every write-in. (Or as it is known in Wrimo circles, Writer’s Crack.) As for Perth, our two regions fought word wars, exchanged care packages, and egged each other on. I can still taste the Tim Tams, and they are probably still buzzing from the pixy stix. 

2007 – Some People Lack Imagination. While running a word war, a Wrimo yelled out, “How much time do we have? I have to kill someone.” I shouted back, “Seven minutes. I could kill billions in seven minutes.” All twenty plus writers whooped in agreement. A woman who had just purchased her coffee stared at us in horror. She backed out of the coffee shop not daring to stop and collect her change. 

2008 – The Muse and Flexibility. Many Wrimos have significant others who are not writers. Shocking but true. To make them feel loved before we utterly abandoned them for a month, we hosted a Halloween party from 9 to 12. At 12:01 AM November 1, we pulled out the power strips, sent the non-writers packing, and started typing. Up to this point, I’d always considered myself a “plotter.” Such a hardcore plotter, I once calculated the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere of an alien world to get the weather I wanted. With my stack of notes at the ready, prepared to bang out my 1667, a little boy appeared, saying, “You have to tell my story.” I argued, “But I have all these orbital calculations!” Didn’t matter. I learned not to argue with the muse and that flexibility makes winning easier.

2009 – How to Suck It Up. That was a terrible slog of a year. I really wasn’t feeling it. I was farting around on the forums when I met a Wrimo who had to finish early. Why? She was deployed in Iraq. She had put her novel on a CD, handed it to her CO, who returned to the base, and uploaded it for her so she could win. Yeah, no inspiration there. I faked a cough to get out of a faculty meeting to make my word count. 

2010 – The Reach of NaNoWriMo. To make new friends after my move, I volunteered at the local community library. I was shelving books, when someone shouted, “Apollo16! Is that you? Mom! It’s Apollo16!” I recognized one of my Young Writers from Chicago. Her family had moved a couple of months before I had. She dragged over her mother and explained how excited she was to still have her Wrimo friends. Her mother gave me the eyeball and said, “You know, she’s going to be a writer now. It’s all your fault.” I grinned. “No, ma’am. It’s Chris Baty’s fault.” 

2011 – Debugging and Love. With the growth of NaNoWriMo worldwide, the old website just couldn’t hack it. After some fundraising, we moved on from Druenemy (okay, Drupal but that’s not what we called it) to Ruby on Rails. We had a massive “debugger” team that spanned the globe. We slew bugs like they were dragons and we were Knights of the Round Table. Few organizations could ask and get so many volunteers to donate so much time and resources. It was awe-inspiring. 

2012 – No Plot No Problem v. 2. Chris Baty asked a bunch of the MLs to provide quotes for his second edition of No Plot No Problem. All the lessons I’ve learned can be found in that book. While you wait for it to be delivered, here are three I shared with him. (1) Buy lots of underwear for the entire family so you won’t have to do as much laundry. (2) Rack up a bunch of childcare credits early in the fall. That way they are beholden to you and can’t weasel when November rolls around. (3) As for the transition to normal life, sometimes it doesn’t happen. Sometimes you get the strength to retire early or change careers so you can continue to write. This quote will haunt me later.

2013 – The Year I Tried To Cheat. I decided to turn one of my scripts into a novel. Should be simple, right? Nope. At day 18, I hit the wall. The script was a script and not a novel. Panicked, after this long of a run, I had to win! I was an ML, a mentor! So, I did what I’ve told countless other Wrimos to never do. I deleted the whole dang thing, all 30,00 words. On day 19, I came clean and started over with a blank page. I made 50,284 at 11:52 PM on Nov. 30. 

2014 –The Night Of Writing Dangerously. The year I finally got to attend. To go to San Francisco. To have dinner in that fantastic ballroom. To sew a costume for the grand event. Unfortunately, I had just developed a food allergy. How could I go and not be able to eat? Grant Faulkner and Sarah Mackey invited me to come up to the buffet table and serve myself first to avoid cross-contamination. The staff of the Office of Letters and Light didn’t just care about writing, but about the writers too. Did I win that night and get to ring the bell? No. I wrote a total of six words. Yet, I was so inspired, I finished early. I didn’t have to hide in the bathroom with my laptop during Thanksgiving like all the other years.

2015 – The Grad Student Figures It Out. When you are the prof, you get to make up the syllabus and control the timeline. For years, mysteriously, there were few tests, problem sets, or projects due in November. Occasionally, one of my grad students would join me for NaNo. In the middle of a write-in, one such grad student jumped to their feet and shouted, “Oh my god! It was never about us! About being nice to us during crunch month! It was always about NaNoWriMo!” Duh.

2016 – Lack of Imagination Part II. That year at our write-in, a guy walked into our section with his food, shot us a judgy glare as we typed, and plunked down opposite my table. A new Wrimo began to cry. I asked her, “Are you okay?” “Yes,” she sniffled, “I just killed someone. I’m embarrassed.” “Oh don’t worry, we all cry when we kill someone. It means you’re doing a great job.” The guy’s eyebrows met his hairline and he hustled right back from whence he came. For the record, this time, we did have signs up everywhere.

2017 – Catch-22. This is the year I started to teach creative writing on the side. Being new and unknown, I feared nobody would sign up. My Wrimo buddies filled the class. I told them how grateful I was. They said the joke was on me. “Now, you have to read all of our novels.” D’oh!

2018 – The Prof Figures It Out. That was the year I taught NaNoWriMo. Got paid to do what I was going to do anyway.

2019 – Website and Young Writer Redux. Technology marches on and we fundraised for yet another website that folded NaNo, Camp, and Young Writer’s into one place. Speaking of young writers, remember the girl from 2010? She got a novel published, and dedicated it to her Wrimo support group.

2020 – 2021 The COVID Years and Family. I was never worried about the survival of the Office of Letters and Light. The support runs too deep, but what of the local groups without in-person events? Silly me, the pivot went without a hitch. We ended up having Zoom write-ins for thirty days straight during both Novembers. Even on Thanksgiving. Why? Because we’d become family. But mostly, because we didn’t force anyone to eat lime Jell-O with an expired can of fruit cocktail suspended inside it like a scene from The Blob.

2022 – Twenty Years and A Million Words. According to my lifetime word counter, I have written 1,380,023 words. However, that number includes all my revisions from Camp. In my heart of hearts, I know I won’t break 1,000,000 until this November. Malcolm Gladwell suggests that we become experts at the 10,000-hour mark of working our craft. Several writers have translated that as 1,000,000 words. I’ve been selling my work since 2010, but with 1,000,000 words so close, I have faith that some of those words might be good words.

Remember, up at the top of this stroll down memory lane, I mentioned how NaNoWriMo altered the course of my life? After twenty plus years as a planetary geologist, I have retired. This fall I will be starting over as a graduate student in an MFA program in Creative Writing. But this time, it isn’t entirely Chris Baty’s fault. It’s Grant Faulkner’s too. He wrote one of my letters of rec. 

See ya in November!

Dr. Kathy Kitts, AKA Apollo16, is a planetary geologist who has served as a science team member on the NASA Discovery Mission Genesis among others. Her latest speculative short fiction has appeared in Compelling SF, James Gunn’s Ad Astra, and Amazing. She has a collection of stories titled Getting What You Need available worldwide on Amazon. Born and raised in the desert southwest, she is moving from New Mexico to Alaska mostly because she isn’t dead yet.

Top photo by Nils Stahl on Unsplash.