Elliot Kessler

NaNoWriMo is upon us! The time has come! My fellow authors, clear your schedule. Use all of your vacation days. The time to begin your manuscript is now!

National Novel Writing Month is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a challenge for authors to write a novel (specifically, at least 50,000 words) within November. It is a difficult challenge that many attempt and few succeed.

But why do so few see their project through to completion? Why do so many fail the challenge?

Because they want to craft a masterpiece. They want to create something incredible. Everyone dreams of doing great things, and every author dreams of writing a masterpiece that sells millions of copies and is an instant success. They want their story to be perfect.

But it isn’t. No story is.

Most people who want to write a book don’t even consider that the first draft isn’t perfect. Often, it isn’t even good. It’s a fast, rough sprawl of text. It’s the author vomiting out a story onto paper so they can clean it up later. The first draft isn’t supposed to be a masterpiece. Not even close. It’s the beginning of your story’s construction. It’s not going to be pretty. Neil Gaiman once said, “The process of doing your second draft is the process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”

Writing a story is fun. Writing a novel is also fun, but it is not nearly as simple as creating a narrative with only one or two thousand words. There is a lot more work that goes into writing a novel, from the lengthier outlines to the larger amount of characters that need to be fleshed out. Subplots, locations, and tens of thousands more words need to be used. Creating a story that is book-length is not easy.

But if it isn’t easy, then how come there are people who do it in a month?

That’s the thing about the title “National Novel Writing Month” that gets everyone. You aren’t writing a novel in a month. You are writing at least 50,000 words in a month. This doesn’t include the endless sea of planning, including outlines and character sheets. The plotting and preparation of the novel is not included in that one month of writing, and it can take years. The novel I am working on took over a year to figure out. I needed to know who the character was, what the plot of the story was going to be, and the genre of the story. The story’s original version was a fantastical, cheesy space opera like my first novel. But it has evolved naturally into something very different that I am much more excited and passionate about.

Another part of writing a novel that isn’t incorporated into NaNoWriMo is editing. Writing a novel requires tons of editing. You must create revision after revision after revision. When a blacksmith pulls the hunk of metal out of the flames and begins hammering away, it doesn’t become a sword after the first few hammer strokes. He puts it back in the flames and hammers it again. Then he puts it in and hammers it again. He does this over and over until he finally has a sword.

We have to look at our stories the same way. An author writes their first draft, stops working on it, puts it back in flames, then comes back to it to begin shaping it again. Then they return it to the flames for a while longer before pulling it back out and shaping it more. This process takes far longer than a month. Making your story the best it can take a very long time and will never, unless you happen to be a writing god, be squeezed into a single month.

That said, I decided to take the plunge and try NaNoWriMo this year.

It seems like I was bashing the whole idea, but I wasn’t. It genuinely is a good thing, but the name can be misleading. It isn’t about writing a novel in a month. It’s about getting that first draft down fast so you can move on to the rest of the book-writing process. It motivates the author to get going. It creates a deadline for them that they have to reach.

Work on my book has been very slow-going. I could blame that because I forgot to buy Scrivener, and my free trial is expired, but that isn’t it. I’m not working on it hard enough. I’m being lazy about it, and it is time that stopped. So, I will do my best and plan out the next month. I will try and write 2,000 words every weekday for the next month.

If you do the math, you probably will realize that number doesn’t add up to 50,000. But that’s because I am already very busy this next month with school, work, this blog, and a planned trip. Hopefully, I will be able to reach this goal. If I do not, feel free to message me on Instagram, virtually slap me across the face, and tell me to get it together because I need it. But I have procrastinated on this novel long enough. It’s a story I am very passionate about and cannot wait for you to experience, so it’s high time I did something about it.

I will be posting about my progress, and for the next month, many of my blog posts will probably be more like journal entries about how things are going. Hopefully, this will all go semi-smoothly.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.