Okay. So it took me more than nine days to get around to saying all of this, but by the time you reach the end of the post, you'll know all about why: NaNoWriMo 2019 is over, and while I beat the challenge - for the fifth time! - it left me feeling more than a little defeated.
There were a couple personal factors that affected the ways I wrote this year, that made things a little different. A little more difficult.
For starters - in keeping with my goals to change up my writing genre and style with every year - I was writing nonfiction, specifically Food Memoir. Surprisingly enough, I actually thought this would make things easier. After all, why spend so much time coming up with a believable invention, rather than your personal perspective, right?
Not exactly.
There's such a thing as writing your truth, but there's also the alternative factor of getting hung up on truth. Once I made the commitment to writing my own real stories, I felt compelled to write them as acurrately as possible... going so far as to rummage around in our kitchen cabinets, to see whether I was remembering the embroidery on a tea towel correctly.
Needless to say, this kind of behavior doesn't exactly tee you up for productive writing sessions. It will definitely cue you to second guess all of your detail work.
Plus, I also - for the first time, really - had a writing partner: after watching me complete my own challenges for nearly half a decade, I inspired my Dad to take on his own writing project too, leading to the creation of a set of Horror shorts.
Through NaNo, he was able to tackle some of the foremost ideas he had germinated over the summer, which he had compiled in a huge list, safeguarded in a binder. With every story he finished, and every morning writing session he logged, his confidence that he could complete what he had previously deemed an insurmountable project grew. While I'm super proud of my Dad for putting in so much work, and venturing so far outside of his comfort zone... it's not exactly easy to succeed on your own terms, when the other person is constantly trying to talk to you about how well they're doing themselves.
Here's another shift I'd made from recent years: I opened up the mental bookshelves this year, too, to make more space for personal reading during NaNo. Usually, I try not to read anything until I've finished my 50,000 word draft, to keep myself more focused on my own story, and my voice more authentic; however, because I was working in a top as personal as a Food Memoir, I figured I could dabble in some titles this time.
This was both a good and a bad thing.
On one hand, this regular daily reading helped me progress further towards my Goodreads goal, which is something I sorely needed. I'm more than six books behind schedule, but during NaNo, that number climbed into double digits.
It also gave me inspiration, not necessarily on voice, but on presentation: I learned what kinds of personal stories make sense in the genre, and what format I hoped to present my work in, how long chapters should be and how many recipes should be included. I know what I like and don't like, from irritating word choices when describing a dish, to leaving readers stranded in a foreign country when authors get too caught up on setting. I knew I appreciated unexpected perspectives and unique flavors. I really hated when one writer included four separate salad dressing recipes in one book, while another used the word "gulp" three chapters in a row.
However, I started to subconsciously absorb what I was reading, and it had an effect on what I was writing. In comparison to past years of taking part in the challenge, I wasn't able to write uninhibited; I was constantly second guessing myself because I was spending so much time thinking about whether things worked or didn't work. You just can't do that when writing a first draft... leave it 'til the second!
It also didn't help that - as it turns out - my mom has a lot more difficult feelings about me writing nonfiction, rather than fiction. In her eyes, writing fiction is a fun, quirky hobby; memoirs are spilling the beans about things that doing just belong to you. At one point, she point blank asked me, "Please don't write this," which, as you can imagine, made it a lot more difficult to write.
It was an unfair, selfish ask, and a very distrusting one, which made me feel compelled to self-edit even more often. I was factoring in someone else's anxieties when I was trying to mitigate my own about simply getting words on a page.
In the end - through all these factors and hurdles - I wrote over 50,000 words, but I'm only proud of about 2/3s of them. I'm excited to get back in and read them over, but I'm going to take a little more time to recover before I do that just yet.
Out of all of my NaNo projects, this feels like it's the least likely to go anywhere. When I first came up with the idea, I kicked around the concept as to whether this would inspire me to listen to a new calling, or enroll in a nearby culinary school. By the time I got to the middle of the project - trailing thousands of words behind schedule, with my mother's voice ringing in my ear - all I could think was, "Why does anyone want to listen to me, of all people, about food? What do I have to add to any of this?"
Maybe this year's project was just an exercise in futility... maybe it was just an exercise in writing something new, and different.
- My non-zero low was 509 words in one writing day; my high was 8,793.
- I wrote a total of 50, 137 words.
- In total, I finished about four of the "chapters" - or segments - I had prospective outlines for.
- I read 3.5 books during the course of my NaNo project.
- I finished 3 days early.
Did you take part in NaNoWriMo this year? How did it go? Let me know, in the comments below!
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