Hi, my name is Mary, and I lost National Novel Writing Month this year.
And that’s okay.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t decide to try NaNoWriMo for the first time this year to fail at it. I don’t think many people try things to fail at them. For a large part of the month, even as I struggled consistently to approach the golden 1667 words a day, even as most of what I was writing felt directionless, I had the same foolhardy optimism about NaNoWriMo that I often had in college, when deadlines for papers or finals approached. I would win NaNo, because of course I would. I’d pull a last minute save, have that creative breakthrough, and the words would flow like a river unleashed after a dam breaks.
I’d win because winning was the only option.
And for sure, I could have done more to succeed. I could have prepped better (though I am at the core a discovery writer), I could have scheduled more writing time, I could have woken up earlier, prioritized differently.
All that said, I think it was good for me to fail National Novel Writing Month. I needed the lesson: sometimes the world is just too much. Sometimes you need to slow down and let your ideas breathe. And most of all:
Failure is okay.
I don’t think this is a message we’re told enough. A corollary to, “failure is okay” might be, “no failure is complete”. No, I didn’t hit the 50,000 word goal in November. But I did still write 36,590 words, and I wrote for 30 days in a row. The ideas I’ve explored on the page in those 36k words don’t go away because I didn’t hit 50k. Without NaNo, there’s no way I would have written that much.
Goals can change. That’s learning to be flexible, to adapt, not failure.
2020 has been a heck of a year. And November was a hell of a month. If you, like me, failed NaNo this year and are feeling down about it, check in with yourself. If you wrote one word during the month of November, that is still progress. Don’t belittle the small steps. Without them, you go nowhere.
And if you won NaNoWriMo this year, congratulations! Savor it. Writing 50 thousand words in a month is no easy feat, as I’ve now learned.
Until next time,
-M