"You Will Surprise Yourself": How Setting Writing Goals Can Expand Your Abilities

During NaNoWriMo’s “In Your Pocket” Summer Drive, we’ll be posting “ My First NaNo ” stories from you, our amazing participants, and the writing tips you learned from your maiden voyage. Today, participant Rebecca Leach shares how committing to her word-count goal showed her she was capable of even more than she’d thought: 

My first National Novel Writing Month was in 2004: I was a senior in high school, filling out college applications and fighting desperately against senioritis. But I loved writing and really wanted to give NaNoWriMo a try.

So I did. In November, I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I shocked myself, the weekend before Thanksgiving, when I realized—I was almost at 50,000! I’d been so lost in the story that I stopped noticing my word count until I was at about 47,000 words.

When I did notice, I said, “Oh. That’s only three thousand more words. I could finish that in a couple of hours. OMG, I’M GOING TO FINISH RIGHT NOW.” And I did. I finished the same day, and for a little while (like, maybe five minutes), I sat back and enjoyed being finished.

But then I got antsy. There were days left in November. I couldn’t just stop writing. I jokingly thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I made it to 100,000 words?’ There was a brief pause in my brain.

I tried to tell myself I was crazy, but I wouldn’t listen. I kept writing. I’m not sure how I managed to pass all my classes, because I was writing all the time. On the last day of NaNoWriMo, I still had 5,000 words to go before making my new goal. I convinced my dad to let me stay up late and write on his computer.

With minutes left until midnight, I crossed the 100,000-word mark and validated my final word count. I’d done it. I’d met this crazy, insane goal I set for myself. And I didn’t fail out of high school!

I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo every year since 2004, but the first year is the one that taught me the most, about succeeding at NaNoWriMo and about being a writer in general. My tips?

Write something you’re super excited about, even if it’s embarrassing or you think it’ll never sell or it’s a genre you’ve never tried before. If you love what you’re writing, the words will come.

Go to write-ins, or organize a meet-up! Even if you’re super shy and awkward and have so little driving experience that you can’t park your dad’s giant SUV and have to run into your very first write-in to ask a bunch of total strangers to safely do it for you—um, not that I have experience with that—you should totally go to write-ins, or start a group.

Other Wrimos are some of the most welcoming, enthusiastic people ever. Even if you’d rather not talk to anyone quite yet, you can still sit and write while surrounded by people who have the same crazy deadline and goal as you. Just being near other writers can provide a huge boost in motivation.

No matter how insane you think you are for trying this, do it anyway. No matter how crazy your life is or how busy your schedule is or how certain you are that there’s no way you can possibly make it to 50,000, try anyway! Because you never know how far you’ll get. You will very likely surprise yourself.

Rebecca Leach  is an information designer and copyeditor from Austin, Texas. She received her master’s in writing from the New School University and is a 2013 Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow. She writes whenever she can—in the morning, in the car, during lunch, and between turns at flying trapeze classes. Currently, she’s working on three speculative YA novels, which are in varying stages of completion.

Photo by Flickr user artnoose.