Why I NaNo & The Best Cup Ever

As I scrounge up spare minutes to put towards finishing off the novella I’m working on in time for November and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I’ve started thinking a lot about NaNo itself.

I did my first NaNo back in ’09. I painted this amazing cup to commemorate the occasion. It’s a cup with a dinosaur breathing fire on it, so you know I was pretty jazzed about the whole thing. I wrote a little novel called The Names We Chose, which I spent the next few months trying to revise before retiring–one day I’ll get back to it, when I feel like I can do the story justice. While I’d been writing pretty frequently before that, it marked the first time I really tried my hand at long fiction with any kind of success.

What I found was that having that goal of 50,000 words at the end of the month kept me writing every single day, which was probably the thing that had been lacking in any attempt up until that point. It’s so easy, when you’re starting a huge project, to delay and wait until the timing is right, but that November I learned to write no matter what, even if sometimes I felt like nothing was going right or making any sense. The timing is never going to be perfect, so you might as well start right away while the idea is fresh.

I also learned that the first draft is always the hardest part. The second draft is by far my favorite part. At that point, I have a complete novel to work with, and sure, maybe the structure is a little shaky and the prose is rough, but I can step back and see it in its entirety and start to build a solid foundation in draft two. I know what’s coming and I can set things up in advance, I can add in all of the things I thought of too late during draft one, so on and so forth. None of that happens until draft one is done, though, and that first November, because of the time constraints and the inability to ever look back, really taught me that my job in draft 1 was just to make sure all of the pieces are in place no matter what else happens.

Now, I like to think I have a pretty firm grasp on the concept. Or, as firm a grasp as is possible. I’ve written something like five novels since then, and I understand how the process works for my brain, largely thanks to NaNo.

But I think the thing I love most about NaNo, and the thing I’ll remember most fondly, is the sense of community. With twitter and blogging these days, it feels like there are more writers than ever and it helps to alleviate some of the isolation involved. But NaNo, to me, is a month-long celebration of writing, and so it’s different still. It’s a chance to meet new people, an excuse to stay up late and drink way too much coffee, to write madly and reward yourself with candy (always the best part!), and to remember just how awesome and fun writing can be.

Because it is. And it can be easy to forget that when you’re banging your head against the wall and wondering why your first draft is so horrid. During November, though, none of that matters and it all just becomes part of the experience.