NaNo Coach: How to Rise Above the Chaos and Write Your Story

This season we’ve brought on published authors to serve as NaNo Coaches to help guide you to reaching 50,000 words. Our second week’s NaNo Coach, Stephanie Watson, shares her words of wisdom below:

In November of 2009, I wrote a NaNo-novel in longhand, in a series of spiral notebooks. In December, my husband and I got pregnant with our first child, and in February, my nine-year marriage ended. 

To recap: book, baby, KABOOM.

During the months that followed, I experienced drama usually reserved for grocery-store novels with gold embossed covers. The divorce court date and Ivy’s birth happened in the same week. My ex chose to not be involved in Ivy’s life, and I became a full-time single parent. The late-night feedings and wonky sleep schedule left me exhausted on a level I could not have imagined, even in my fiction-writer’s brain. I started back to work as a freelance web writer in a mental fog: juggling deadlines, late-night feedings, diapers, doctor visits, bills, laundry and what to make for dinner. Stories, like sleep, became a distant memory.

My original plan after writing the 2009 NaNo-novel was to type it up and jump into revisions. But, as I bounce-walked around the house with Ivy strapped to my chest (the only place she would nap), I would look rather cynically at the spiral notebooks on my desk. How could I ever return to that story in the middle of all this? I couldn’t even string together a cohesive sentence, much less a chapter.

But you know how stories are. Like babies, they tug at your hem no matter how busy you are. The story haunted my thoughts as I washed bottles or patted Ivy to sleep. I started jotting revision notes on recipe cards, and scheduled secret dates with my novel. I can’t run away with you, but I can meet for half an hour.

Something in me needed to write, even in the midst of all the craziness, or perhaps because of it. My old life and morning writing routine were gone. I had less time and energy than before. My character was stuck in the middle of a world full of trouble and she had to keep going. And so did I.

I waited till Ivy was sleeping through the night, then started revising every day in small, snatched moments. After almost 18 months, I finally finished a new draft of the novel on November 1st—just a few weeks ago. It took longer than I predicted, but I did it, in the midst of making meals and trips to the park and writing websites and interrupted showers.

If my life had not exploded, I never would’ve learned that it’s possible to write when things are very, very crazy. And that it can actually be a gift to have limited time to create. If you only have an hour with your story, you cut to the chase faster. You don’t fritter away time on Twitter or Facebook. With just a handful of minutes till the next interruption, your writing takes on a vital urgency. I have something to tell you and only five minutes to do it. So listen up.

So here we are in mid-November, mid-NaNo, mid-novel. Your characters are in deep trouble and perhaps you have no idea how (or if) they’ll get out of it. You may be wondering why you took on this insane challenge to write a novel in 30 days, because you were already up to your neck in busy, and you have to thaw the turkey and clean the house and respond to a bunch of work emails and a kid is pounding down the bathroom door as you read this.

We are all in the thick of it. Life has us surrounded. In stories, that’s the good part, where you get to see what a character is made of. Rise up and write in the middle of the craziness. Let the events and emotions of your life inform and fuel your work. This is your chance to show the world that you are made of strong stuff.

Stephanie Watson is the author of The Wee Hours, Elvis & Olive, and Elvis & Olive: Super Detectives, which was a 2008 NaNoWriMo project. She also teaches writing workshops, performs comedy improv and chases after her 3-year-old daughter Ivy.