I Beat NaNoWriMo 2021!

Well, I did it again: I beat my writing challenge for National Novel Writing Month 2021!

Did I beat it recently? Well, no: I beat it exactly a week ago, back on November 25th, at like 12:34 in the morning. You see, my annual goal is getting it all wrapped up by Thanksgiving, and after pulling out 9,281 words in a 24 hour period, I actually did the damn thing, which - up until about a week previous to that point - I wasn't even sure was going to happen at all. 

So perhaps you can imagine why I've been putting off writing about it here so strongly. I had a convenient excuse or two... there's Thanksgiving with the family to get through, of course, and then setting up the house for Christmas in the two days following, but subsequent to those points, there was a lot less in my favor to argue for continuing to not acknowledge my tremendous victory.

Then again, that's almost 10K words - a good fifth of the overall challenge - that I wrote in one day. In just the drafting for this blogpost alone, I've misspelled the word "novel" twice already. I had to let the word gardens of my mind flower and regrow again before I made another pass over them with the absolute garbage hacking lawn mower I call my personal writing habits. 

In total, this is my seventh year participating in NaNo and winning, which honestly feels pretty damn good... and only continues to set up for the inevitable year when I am unable to meet the challenge, and all of the self-worth I've stacked on the flimsy collapsible table of "I can write a lot in a short amount of time" will someday fall down. 

But yes, I am the champion, and all that. 

For now. 

Let's continue to just ignore the fact that I'm still 11 books behind on this year's already-reduced Goodreads goal, shall we?

Anyways, here's some of the important stuff that came to mind while writing this year:

1. I acknowledge I left you on a bit of a cliff-hanger in my last blog entry, so you should know, that I ended up picking up "Ferdy Fernsby" again - my previous year's story concept, for which I wrote a 50K word outline - for pretty good reasons. You could argue that it was the right choice because it provided the strongest foundation for building a compelling story, you could say that it was the one that came with the most peer expectation driving it, you might have chosen it yourself based sheerly on the principle that it's a gem of a concept and deserved a little extra attention. 

All told the reason I chose to pick it up again was this: I reread approximately two pages of the outline, and was immediately overwhelmed by a feeling of abandonment so strong that I knew immediately that revisiting this world that I had created was of the utmost priority. I didn't want to leave my characters sitting all alone and unsupervised in some incomplete Word document.

Or, as I phrased it to my younger brother: 

2. I wrote the actual novel itself... through Chapter Three. 

This should only be half of a surprise: because my last year's Challenge was spent constructing an insanely detailed outline, it should have been easy enough to guide myself through writing elements like world-building details and character dialogue, which, if we're all being honest here, are definitely the most fun parts of writing fiction. However, things didn't shake out that way... because I kept finding myself adding more and more detail. And characters. And set pieces. And backstory. 

I may have tapped out at 51,590 words, but that's only because each of my Chapters that far had qualified practically as it's own short story, and thanks to a 25K word Chapter One, maybe even a novella. 

3. As it turns out, writing a detailed 50,000 word outline is NOT going to give you everything you need to know about the characters who fill out of the population of a whole kingdom-state. And while I have previously lauded my own ability to organically generate compelling character names - which, to again toot my own horn, I am - I certainly had a devil of a time coming up with actual people to occupy the world, deciding whether they were important enough to even get a name, and then dealing with being surprised when they inevitably come back 'round into the narrative again later. 

Honestly, NaNo can be a bit of a mind-killer when you get too bogged down with the fact that upon revising, some of those hard-won words are going to have to be taken out. It can really get into your head, and affect the flow in which you keep writing... which doesn't exactly make the Challenge easier, either. 

The frustrating part about being a writer, is that everything - both the good and the bad - is your own fault. Thanks, brain! 

Am I glad I did it? Obviously. I always am. But will I forever be perennially frustrated when the process is not as easy, charming, or enjoyable as I expect it to be? Yeah. NaNoWriMo 2021, you really sent me for a loop.

But on the flip side, you also make me want to write again on my own terms, when I'm not staring down the barrel of having to make up for a 13K word deficit when I'm only 10 days into the challenge. So maybe deconstructing negative self-guided behaviors is a win? 

Did you take part in NaNo this year? How did things go? Did any of this stream-of-consciousness-while-on-cold-medication blogpost make sense? Let me know, in the comments below!