Writing Is a Journey: Enjoy the Climb

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” — Neil Gaiman

“I have a book in me.” Don’t lie—it’s something that we have all said to ourselves. I, for one, am pretty confident that someday I will write the next “Great American Novel.” Seriously. And I’m not alone. According to an oft-quoted 2002 article from The New York Times, Joseph Epstein states that 81 percent of Americans are in the same boat.

Chris Guillebeau, of The Art of Non-Conformity, takes the math one step further: “More than 80 percent of people say they want to write a book, but less than one percent do.” Which means that, four out of five of the people you will encounter today have space operas and spy thrillers, fantasies, and fairy tales curled up inside of them.

Most of these people will never write these stories down. They will go about their days carrying these unborn half-stories—periodically lamenting that they simply haven’t the time to write a book or, after a glass too many, explaining in detail why their book would be the next big thing, if only they’d actually, you know, start it. It is a beautifully tragic thing, how the books we never write are best sellers in our minds.

And that is where NaNoWriMo comes in: providing the one time of the year when we get to look ourselves in the mirror and force ourselves to write. To throw open the doors to our secret worlds and let in the light. What would be my best advice for going forward on your NaNo journey?

Don’t care about whether you’re good enough to write a book, or whether or not anyone will want to read what you’ve written. Write every day, regardless of whether you feel like it. Write to prove to yourself that you can. Write for the sake of writing.

Because here is the scary truth: Miley Cyrus is right. It’s all about the climb. That fat stack of pages at the end of November are half as important as the hours you spent forcing yourself to think of them. And think of them. And think of them.

Maybe you will end up writing the next Harry Potter (and dancing in piles of money) but honestly, who cares if you do? Writing is an experience worth having in-of-itself, no matter what the outcome is. The real reward in writing a book isn’t the manuscript you get at the end of it, but what you gain along the way.

You discover that your characters have the ability to surprise you. You learn the joy of losing yourself in a scene at three o’clock in the morning while the rest of the world is dreaming. You realize that this huge, mad thing you’d talked about doing for months—years!—wasn’t that scary after all. All you had to do was put one foot in front of the other, one word after the next. The beauty of NaNoWriMo is that you can make the climb with hundreds of thousands of others. Even though writing is essentially a solitary act, this November we’re all writing together.

Most likely, December will begin with you showing your novel to friends and family, who’ll congratulate you and then move on to talking about last night’s episode of Survivor. And that is perfectly fine. Because while they chat about television shows, you can let your mind wander to the characters you’ve created, the writing friends you’ve made, the hours you spent losing yourself in a world that was completely your creation. And if that isn’t worth the 50,000 words, than I don’t know what is.

The folks behind Grammarly, the world’s best grammar checker, is planning to throw its hat into the ring—but with a twist. We plan to organize the largest group of authors to ever collaborate on a NaNoWriMo novel; we’re calling the project #GrammoWriMo. Throw your hat in the ring and join in here. 

A self-proclaimed word nerd, Allison VanNest works with Grammarly to help perfect written English.

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