What is Nanowrimo? Well for those of you who don’t know it stands for national novel writing month, it is at its core a writing challenge. Fifty thousand words in one month, a first draft producing aid on many levels. I have heard people argue against rushing through novels in this way and indeed the points they make are valuable ones. For instance going into Nanowrimo and meeting your goal is unlikely to lead you to the top of the publishing industry with a book which will outsell Harry Potter. The novel you produce is going to need an edit to check for plot holes, inconsistent naming of characters and those places in which the text refuses to flow, among others. All of what I have said here is fairly obvious but I want to move on to talking about how this challenge has helped me personally as a writer despite all that I mentioned above.

Firstly it taught me to expect that my first draft would not be the best piece of literature ever written. In a group of mine on facebook the cover photo is a quote by Margaret Atwood. ‘If I waited for perfection I would never write a word.’ The simple fact of the matter is that this quote speaks true for nearly every writer I know, this idea of I shouldn’t work on this project because it isn’t good enough, it discourages projects and creativity. So why does Nanowrimo help? Firstly you have a month to do fifty thousand words, I know this is just me repeating the brief for the challenge but take a moment to think about how many words that is. In size ten new roman it is no less than fifty three A4 pages. It is a lot of work to fit in around daily life in November and so if you are going to succeed you can’t afford to hesitate. You quite simply don’t have time to sit there and think why should I write this? It isn’t good enough etc. You have to sit down and produce the work otherwise at the end of the month you can’t validate your word count and earn the goodies at the end, free book printing from self-publishing sites so you can hold your novel in your hands.

But it doesn’t just help with the motivation, having the word count to meet may be the thing that drives you but it is not reflective of what else you learn in the process. Perhaps the most important thing it has taught me is to record my world building and to have a physical plan for the novel. These are things that can help to circumvent some of the issues above such as inconsistent naming of characters should you change your mind mid manuscript and preventing plot holes, as you at least have a reasonable idea of how the plot moves from part A to part B or from chapter to chapter. The longest project I have ever completed and in all honesty the project I was most proud to have completed was written for Nanowrimo. Breaking Storm I called it, I know great name right? But the name isn’t that important for the first draft, my current WIP (work in progress) is simply titled both on the Nanowrimo site and in word as New Idea. Anyways Breaking Storm was the first novel I ever planned out and I needed to. It was an eighty thousand word draft when I finished, forty chapters worth of plot and with a complex world of many gods, mythical creatures and unknown interactions. I still have the folder in which resides a fairly basic but sturdy plan. Several printed A4 pages of bullet points under the chapter number listing events that would happen in the given chapter in such a way that made it clear where the plot was going. I relied fairly heavily on this plan, it has ticks and lines drawn through parts I decided not to run with or changed but it was still the only reason I managed to write eighty thousand words, instead of fifty in one month on top of my AS level studies.

Before I move onto why world creation and learning to write it down was important to my development as a writer I want to touch on what I just said in a little more depth. Time management is key for Nanowrimo, as I said at the beginning it can sometimes be hard to fit it in around your day to day life. In my case I had to balance it with homework and coursework whilst attending Sixth Form. My solution was to sit down and do my homework then write solidly depending on what was going to come up that week. If I had Judo on Thursday and Monday nights with badminton on Wednesday, then that meant that I had to write an hour when I got back and an hour before I went out. This was the kind of planning and almost the work side to writing that I had never made myself experience before then. For the first time I had a deadline to meet and I made sure that I met it. This is a skill that was and is easily transferable to work across the spectrum. Time management is crucial to Nanowrimo and having to work at my novel as if it were a regular job for a good few hours every day to meet my deadline is one of the things which led me ultimately to choosing creative writing at university. Whilst I had not and have not yet worked to a deadline given to me by a publisher, I felt that I had the drive and motivation to do this as more than just a hobby. To try and pursue this as a career. I think that when I wrote about the kick start moments earlier on for this blog I failed to recognise the different types of kick start moments. Focusing on inspirations rather than what finally made me realise this was more than just a hobby, or at least I wanted it to be.

So moving onto that all important subject that I broached earlier on. World creation. This seems like one of the obvious things to embark upon before one writes a novel. I did some of this before I came to Nano but not nearly enough if I am being honest with myself. Nanowrimo changed that in such a way that now a novel doesn’t feel like it is complete before I have at least a vague idea of the world’s history, its people, how power dynamics have changed etc. For instance my current work in progress is actually a telling of the history for an idea I had because I felt strongly the history of the world deserved to be a book in its own right. A long time ago I would just have run with the original idea and not known enough about the history to have even thought about making this decision. But why did this change for Nanowrimo and why is it important that you do your world building in advance rather than adding large swathes in November? Well the reason again has to do with time management which in my admittedly limited experience, having only tried Nanowrimo three times been the difference between success and failure. If you do your world building in advance you don’t have to try and name that important Elf General that you come across, or that large river at the bottom of which lies a rather crucial artefact which you had named and left at that. I have heard many authors talk about map building, which is something I have tried to do many times unsuccessfully. For me world building is done by writing about characters and places, describing major features of what I can see in my mind’s eye to write up later. But map building definitely has its benefits, it allows you to recognise distances effectively within your own novel and not accidently create a plot hole by turning your character around even though he is going to the place he just left. It could be something as simple as this or something much larger but it helps, from my limited map drawing I can tell that. It might not help for you but if you are world building for Nanowrimo in the future I would recommend having a crack at it. This and other world building exercises are in short a great way to save much needed time when you are in the middle of the main event.

So far I have listed the ways in which Nanowrimo has helped my world building, my novel planning and motivation but I want to touch on motivation once more. Before I took part in Nanowrimo, in fact before I had ever heard of this event, I was someone who very rarely finished projects larger than a fairly short poem, four or five stanzas being the longest I would usually get to. In fact the largest project I completed before Nanowrimo was thirty thousand words that made up part one in what I was hoping would be a longer novel and is most conveniently for this post still in progress or perhaps more honestly as finished as it will ever get. Sadly whilst I may rewrite the part I completed and a little more in the future for the moment The Grief of Ziemach a fantasy novel and indeed my first work that was large enough to consider a book. Short story or not is languishing the pile of many works which I got excited about, wrote some of and gave up on. Go me. But by being able to set a word count that is essentially the length of the story, I have been able to complete one eighty thousand word novel draft and get one work in progress to fifty thousand which I hope to get to roughly eighty thousand and polish off in the next two months. These are projects that I have completed along with writing twenty four stanza poems or ones of some other such length. I honestly do in many ways attribute this to Nanowrimo and my first and indeed second experiences with it. For me it is a really empowering challenge that allows me to prove to myself time and time again that I can do the work load, that I can finish a large word count without giving up. It is in a sense the one thing that allowed me to move past the stage of this is bad I shouldn’t write this and continue it, to finish at least a first draft. I still get that feeling, the feeling that my work is not good enough, but by now have brought myself to the point where I can complete a first draft of just about anything I turn my mind to.

Of course motivation is not just a word count and what better example than the community that Nanowrimo creates. You are one of maybe hundreds of thousands of people taking part in this challenge. You are not alone. This feeling is one that we all have, the feeling that we should give up. But the encouragement from other people in the same boat is something that cannot be understated. I am awfully competitive and in the cabins system with cabin statistics I find myself racing the other cabin members, pushing myself to get the job done. But moving away from that the Nanowrimo facebook group is one that is great for asking for feedback on ideas, finding inspiration under the annoying tag ‘Plot Bunny’ they share news articles and weird things they think may inspire others as well as helping with research and supporting members of their community in general. There is a writer that posts Nanowrimo and writing related short comedy stories who has certainly brightened my day more times than I can count. It really is one of the best groups I have ever seen on facebook, it is well administrated as well leading to me never having had an overtly negative experience. Arguments and discussions are common and it feeds into the writing life style that was mentioned at the beginning of my university course. Writers do not work in isolation. There are other writers out there and this is a great place to find other writers and to share in their experiences and learn or be inspired by them all year round not just when writing your novel draft or fifty thousand word project in November.

The other great thing about Nanowrimo as alluded to earlier when I mentioned the facebook group is that it never really stops, with camps which are essentially more relaxed versions of the main event in which you set your own count, could edit a novel you wrote in November or work on a dissertation, the camps in July and April ensure that you are really never out of the world of writing should you wish to immerse yourself in it fully. For instance you may find yourself as I have spending the month before Nano doing nearly as much work planning and detailing, thinking and creating as you go. It really does encourage productivity. It doesn’t matter if it is not the best work ever written this is something the Nanowrimo support team makes clear in their care package filled with advice and ideas sent into your on-site inbox and your email, nanowrimo is not there to get you published at its core. It is there to encourage you to write, it is there to give you the draft from which a published work could be made. It is in short a mechanism for productivity, one which supports, motivates and teaches you all kinds of skills that you might not otherwise have considered unless you had to work to a deadline. My recommendation is to give Nanowrimo a go. Whether you are reading this as an aspiring author like myself who struggles to get words down on paper at any kind of speed due perfectionism or nagging doubt. An adult who has wanted to write a novel but never thought they could or taken the time to go about it. At the end of the day what are you losing? Some time in one month of the year when the pay-off could be finally completing that story you have been working on or thinking about for as long as you can remember. A gained community in which likeminded people in similar situations exist, support or advice on your writing, how to plan or even asking why should you plan. (Yes you should)

Here’s me hoping that something in this convinced you to have a go at Nanowrimo should it sound like the kind of thing you would like to do and if not I hope you found this reflective piece on how Nanowrimo as a challenge has helped to shape me as a writer interesting. I hope you are all enjoying great days.
All the best
Hugh.