Guest Post: Susanna Fraser – I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year
I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year. Unless I get to the point where I can afford to quit my day job and write full time, I never will again.
Don’t get me wrong, I think NaNo is a wonderful thing, and I’m always excited by the writerly energy in the air at this time of year. But I also want to grab everyone and warn them to be careful that they don’t let one month of writing do permanent damage to their bodies. Let my tale of woe be a lesson to you all.
I’ve attempted NaNo twice. The first time I completed the challenge, getting 50,000 words into a manuscript that eventually became the 100,000-word alternative history that is my personal Book Under the Bed. One of these days I’ll dig it out, revise it, and submit it again.
But the second time, in 2010, ended up being one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. You see, I had this new desk in my writing office. It was beautiful and elegant, made of dark wood with all these clever little compartments for my office supplies and to conceal hidden built-in outlets. It was a grown-up’s desk that had never seen the inside of an IKEA warehouse. It was a serious writer’s desk. I was going to create the most beautiful stories there.
Unfortunately, what it wasn’t was comfortable. No matter how I tried, I never found a way to sit at it that didn’t feel awkward and strained. But I was stubborn, and I figured my body would adapt. Even when I developed severe pain in my left shoulder and down into my arm and hand, I pushed onward. I’d committed to NaNo, and I hated to go back on my word to myself and my writer friends. Besides, I wasn’t sure the pain was the desk’s fault. A few days before the pain flared up I’d been carrying my sleeping then-6-year-old daughter and had to jerk to catch her when she lolled off my shoulder.
After a week of hearing my complaints and seeing me wince and whimper, my husband staged a mini-intervention. He reminded me my health was more important than meeting an arbitrary goal and begged me to step away from the computer for a few days. I did, even going so far as to take that Thursday and Friday off from my day job to give myself four whole days of rest.
Sadly, it was too little, too late. My shoulder didn’t improve, and my left hand went almost entirely numb. It got so bad that one day in December I reached into the fridge for a soda and thought, “Funny. I put these in 8 hours ago. Why aren’t they cold?” I switched the can into my right hand and realized the soda was just as it should be—but I’d lost most of the sensation of temperature in my bad hand.
I won’t go through my whole medical saga of the next six months, but I was ultimately diagnosed with a pinched nerve, likely caused by poor ergonomics, though the incident carrying my daughter didn’t help.
With physical therapy and massage, I got much better. My left hand distinguishes hot and cold just as well as the right, and after a year of PT I was able to write at a decent professional pace again. But I’ve had to accept that I’ll never again have the healthy neck and shoulder I had in October 2010. I feel some degree of pain and stiffness in my left shoulder and arm almost every day. My physical therapist and I are buddies. I carefully dole out the 16 massage appointments my insurance will cover over the course of the year to keep my perpetually tight muscles functional. I never sit down to watch TV without pulling a couple bags of frozen corn out to soothe my sore spots while I relax.
And I sold that beautiful desk and replaced it with a simple wooden table from IKEA that allows me to mount a keyboard tray at just the height and angle the ergonomics specialist who set up my desk at work recommended. When I write at home, I stay at the keyboard for half an hour, then get up for at least 15 minutes to stretch or walk or do chores—anything to change my body position. I can’t quite do that at the day job, but I make time for regular stretches and look for reasons to get up and walk around the office.
Learn from my mistake. PLEASE. It’s getting down to the last week of NaNoWriMo, and I know you want to push yourself to the limit. And you can push your creativity, push through sleep deprivation, spend all of Thanksgiving weekend in front of your computer, whatever, but do NOT try to write through severe physical pain.
Listen to your body. Believe me, it’s FAR better to have only 40,000 words at midnight on December 1 than to push yourself to 50,000 at the cost of such damage to your body that you’ll never be able to write that fast again. Because I can’t. I know better than to try. This month I’m doing a half-NaNo, trying to get to 25,000 words on my newest manuscript. That’s a worthy accomplishment in itself, just like a half marathon is a damned impressive piece of running, but I wish I’d been more careful in 2010 and spared myself a chronic injury.
I wish all of you NaNo-ers the best of luck, but at the risk of sounding like my mom, be careful. You’ve only got one body—be kind to it and use it wisely.
Susanna Fraser lives in Seattle with her husband and nine-year-old daughter. When not busy writing or at her day job, she enjoys trying new recipes and singing—this December she intends to hit not one, not two, but THREE Messiah sing-alongs. She grew up in Alabama and is an avid fan of the Auburn Tigers, but she’s recently jumped on the Seahawks’ bandwagon as well.
She is the author of four historical romances. Her first time travel romance novella, Christmas Past , releases this coming Monday, November 25, 2013.
Website: http://www.susannafraser.com/
Blog: http://authorsusannafraser.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @susannafraser
