I have a love/hate relationship with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which is a strange relationship to have when I’ve never attempted to participate. Partly that’s because I don’t write fiction, but even if I did, I chafe against many community initiatives—I’m just not a joiner.
NaNoWriMo is about more than that, of course, and I’ve long seen the good it can do. It leads to a couple vital things for the writing life: commitment and practice. I’ve always remembered this quote from Anne Morriss about commitment: “The irony of commitment is that it’s deeply liberating – in work, in play, in love. The act frees you from the tyranny of your internal critic, from the fear that likes to dress itself up and parade around as rational hesitation. To commit is to remove your head as the barrier to your life.” That, I think, is the value of NaNoWriMo.
Still, I see more evidence these days that writers feel pressured to produce—produce more in shorter amounts of time, especially in the indie author community. When I ran a guest post about how long it takes to write a book, it received more visits and discussion than any post that month. People are judging themselves harshly, and the resulting anxiety only makes matters worse.
In this month’s Glimmer Train bulletin, Rachel Heng enters the discussion with her essay, How I Wrote My Novel in Two Years and Other Accounting Tricks. She writes:
Many of my creative breakthroughs happened on my evening commute home or while sitting in a meeting room or walking through the fifteenth overpriced wedding venue that week. All those other commitments took time away from the actual writing, but what I’m realising now is they also gave my subconscious the room to figure out characters and worlds and plot problems. All the time I thought of as “wasted” had never been wasted after all. Everything goes into writing, everything is writing.
These days, I try not to force myself to sit at my desk for five or six hours straight just because I feel like I need to be Writing.
Also this month at Glimmer Train:
- Writing What We Run From by Laura Roque
- Strikethroughs and Strikeouts by Peter Sheehy
Jane Friedman has spent nearly 25 years working in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. She is the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2023. Her latest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with organizations such as The Authors Guild to bring transparency to the business of publishing.
I’m not doing NaNo (I have a few times, “won” it 2x) and likely never will again. I’m very over the idea that indie writers need to be constantly producing, to the tune of 3 books a month. I wish I had that kind of time.
After flirting with writing a few times, NaNo gave me the excuse to go all in. The first NaNo I produced was pure trash, in large part because I thought I had to write a complete novel–and I am definitely not someone who can tell a story in 50,000 words! But participating really primed the pump, so to speak, and within two weeks of wrapping up my NaNo, I was into my first really, really serious project.
My writing schedule rarely seems to coincide these days with NaNo. Being older and wiser, I would approach it a little differently than I did then.
I’ve never used NaNoWriMo to actually write novels, but as a kick in the pants for long projects that need finishing– like typing up a backlog of journals or edit thorough another novel draft– in the company of people who are also tackling ambitious projects. The crowd’s momentum helps carry me through without stopping.
Thanks so much for writing and posting this, Jane. I love the idea that commitment = liberation. I’ve never thought about it in exactly those terms, but that really resonates.
I often describe NaNoWriMo as “one part boot camp, one part rollicking party.” The boot camp part–developing the discipline to show up and write every day–can help people embark on what I hope is a life-long practice to put in the “10,000 hours to reach mastery,” per the Malcolm Gladwell concept.
Some people need the party part as well, though–meaning the community–because it can be a galvanizing force of motivation, a way to remain accountable while developing one’s practice, and a way to have those creative breakthroughs that Rachel Heng describes. I find that some writers (perhaps the more extroverted ones) find their creative sparks when bantering and sharing with others, while others are more likely to have their breakthroughs in an elevator or in the shower (and then there are some who do both).
Once you plant the seed of a story and then water it with a month of intense writing and the mulch of commitment, I like to think your story will bloom in many unexpected ways afterward–at whatever speed the story deserves. There’s a time to crank out the words, in other words, and then there’s a time to tweak, noodle, cut, reconfigure, pause, and meditate.