NaNoWriMo 2023 - Week 1 (November 1 - 7)
Spoiler Alert: I hate it
The first week of NaNoWriMo has come to a close and I’m hating it so far. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is a month long challenge for writers to write a 50,000 word novel in the thirty days of November. I’ve participated since 2011, have been successful in writing 50,000 words (or over) from 2017 on, but only in the last few years have actually finished a novel, and even then some of those projects are still works in progress.
I’ve gotten better at focusing on what I’m writing though. As author Catherynne M. Valente once critiqued, writing 50,000 words in a month isn’t difficult if it’s crap. And trust me, a lot of my early NaNo attempts were crap. They were disjointed drabbles, quilt squares with nothing to thread the plot together. But over the years I’ve gotten better at writing a cohesive story during NaNoWriMo, and in recent years I’ve actually surpassed the 50,000 word goal by quite a lot. But this year I knew I wasn’t going to try to outdo myself. I have some things I’m working on right now, some things I’m trying to finish concurrently with NaNoWriMo.
Now you may be thinking, Sarah, why don’t you just not do NaNoWriMo this year if you’re already working on something else? And the answer to that is if I don’t do NaNoWriMo this year then my seven year streak will be broken, and I will not let the NaNoWriMo website see me as a failure.
I think this is a perfectly reasonable answer.
But this story is hard. It’s one that popped into my head while watching a certain TV show about a girl’s soccer team stranded in the Canadian wilderness. I like the idea. I really, really, like it. But it’s clear that the story is nowhere near ready to write.
In the world of NaNoWriMo (and writing in general, I guess) you are either a Planner or a Pantser. A Planner someone who plans and outlines what they write, a Pantser is someone who doesn’t outline and just writes.
I’m a Pantser. I’ll often have an idea of what I’m writing, I may even think I know where the plot is going in my head but when I start writing the story usually leads me on it’s own way. Things I thought I’d had planned in my head change, and I like that. I never know exactly where my story will go and that makes it more exciting to write.
That being said, I usually sit with a story awhile. I let the ideas, characters, and plot sit and simmer in my brain until I have an idea of the story I want to tell. I don’t go in completely blind, I know what I’d like to do and am open to surprises. And that’s the issue with this story, it hasn’t simmered long enough.
I started a draft of this back in May and stopped because I realized it needed more time to simmer, worked on something else hoping that by the time NaNo rolled around it would be more ready. Spoiler alert, it’s not.
At times writing this story feels like pulling teeth. I originally wrote it in a mix of first and third person but am now rewriting it as a first person perspective in the hopes I can understand the main character better. I don’t know her very well, and after seven days I don’t know her all that much better. I know what I’d like to happen, who I’d like her to be. I know how I’d like to write it, but I don’t have the voice yet. And it’s beyond frustrating to be writing something, to have over 11,000 words of a story and know that the voice is wrong.
I’ve been staying on par, and that’s good. I just plan on getting to 50,000 words. Even if it isn’t good, I’m hoping I’ll have some bones laid out for this story, some idea of what I don’t want to do so that what I do comes clearer. It’s a nice idea in theory, right?
So join me, on my weekly complaints updates on my NaNoWriMo journey! And be my Writing Buddy if you want!
What I’ve Been Doing When Not Doing NaNoWriMo:
Reading: Pet Sematary by Stephen King, Burr by Brooke Lockyer, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Listening To: Chappell Roan (The Rise And Fall of a Midwest Princess), my Dopamine When The World Is Mean Playlist
Watching: Swallow (2019, dir. Carlo Mirabella-Davis), A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour)