It’s NaNoWriMo season, which means a ripple of excitement throughout the writing community as people try their hands at daily writing sprints to finish 50k words in a month.
Confession: ever since I became heavily involved in writing communities, I actually kinda hated November. NaNoWriMo always brought with it a tinge of “You SHOULD be writing, why aren’t you?” which would lead me to, well…write even less. I don’t know about you, but feeling bad about myself very rarely works to get me to commit to anything, especially something as grueling as writing every day.
Because writing every day IS hard! It’s work! For me, it requires about as much pain and commitment as exercise, except at least exercise is over after half an hour and writing can take so much longer. Submitting to yourself to pain for more pain doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for exercise, and it’s not going to work for writing.
Which is why approaching NaNoWriMo as “You have to get X amount of words every day!” has always been a point of failure for me. I always used to just think I wasn’t capable of writing fast at all. That I’m a slow writer at heart.
And yet…
I’ve written six complete novels since 2017. The word count is much higher than what those novels show, as I went through a number of revisions with some and rewrites with at least one. This means that in the last 3 years, I’ve gone on writing sprints that doubled the workload and commitment required for NaNoWriMo.
What changed? Well…I started applying hiking lessons to writing.
I grew up a bookworm. I hate exercise. Neither of my parents exercised. I didn’t grow up in an athletic household and frequently made excuses to get out of PE class. I still can’t run a whole track without wanting to rip my lungs out of my body and stomp on them. Do you know why I do it now? So I can keep myself fit, so I can hike, because even though I also hate exercise while hiking I CANNOT get enough of the scenery. The promise of a glacier-filled blue lake nestled between snow-capped mountain meadows will get me through hours of climbing over wet boulders with 50 lbs strapped to my back. It’s got nothing to do with loving the pain, and everything to do with knowing that I want what’s at the end. In time, I managed to train my brain to shut itself off from the pain and exhaustion, because it knows what’s about to come.
I get that same high when I hit the best parts of a story…the ones that make me cry, laugh, or fills me with breathless excitement. Tali fighting a battle at the roof of the government building in The Wolf of Oren-yaro, or facing down dragons in the Kyo-orashi arena, or that heart-pounding moment in The Ikessar Falcon where a stolen kiss is as deadly as the assassin at their heels. And I don’t write those moments on a whim. Many of them have been in my brain for months, even years–I’ve gone through them over and over again that by the time I get to writing them, I’ve been champing at the bit, wanting the feel of the story on my fingertips and to see it with my own eyes. I want that high and if I’m going to have to walk over boulders barefoot to get there I will.
How did I move from barely writing every day to being able to manage 2-5k word counts at a time? I sit with the story. I sit with the story so long I get bored and want to WRITE about it.
That means instead of forcing myself to confront a blank page immediately, I take my time. I will play music. I will lie in bed and think about the story. I go on a long walk and think about nothing but the story, the characters, their lives, those glorious scenes. It’s a sort of mindful daydreaming. It’s diving deep into the story and sifting out the parts that work because when I DO finally get in front of the computer…
…the story just flies. (I’m exaggerating, of course. Sometimes it flies and then stalls, and sometimes it even crashes, and that’s also okay. I just restart the engine again. Maybe I have to fix some things first. Rinse and repeat. Every story is different–the process is a whole journey altogether). Eventually, it yields something. Not the best draft, not always. But then I think about the story again, I think about those scenes, I think about the characters. I get to know the characters so well I feel like I’m swimming in their thoughts instead of in mine. And then it compels me to get through the tough bits, the rewrites and revisions, all because I want that high of getting to those places.
And there you have it. My not-so-dirty secret. You can’t write when you have nothing. So take a moment to stop, and think about what you’ve got, and give yourself the room to discover everything you love inside your work. Relax, and give yourself the room to wait for the story to blossom. Don’t work yourself up into feeling bad because you need to put in exactly 1522 words that day and you’re running out of daylight. Look at the story first. Trust me–once it sparks, once it sets a fire inside your mind, you’ll be running for your computer no matter what time of the day it is. The act of putting words to the screen is a mechanical thing. Whether you do a hundred words a day or ten thousand shouldn’t matter in the end. What matters is loving what’s on the page. That’s “winning,” right there.
(And for those tackling NaNoWriMo–good luck! Every word you write is a job well-done!)
