NaNoWriMo and the real world

NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is an annual event where people all over the world write every day in November, with the aim of having written 50,000 words of a story they’ve been meaning to write but never found the time for. And dear God, is it hard.

I love writing, I really do. If I had my way, I’d spend all my time writing the plays, stories, and strange little things that pop into my head. But I don’t get my way. You know who does get their way? Landlords. Electricity companies. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that… in this post, maybe I will some other time. What I am saying in this post is that I can’t spend all my time writing creative things and also afford my rent. So while I spend my time earning money, all of my creative ideas sit in notebooks, just waiting to be written. Poor little things, if only they knew how unlikely that was.

NaNoWriMo is the perfect opportunity for someone like me to stop, think, and say “Okay, this month I’m going to put an extra little bit of time aside and finally start that novel I’ve always wanted to write”. In theory, that’s fine, but there’s one little thing stopping me: the number 1,667.

For those of you not familiar with NaNoWriMo, you’re supposed to write 1,667 words every single day in order to reach your final goal of 50,000 words in a month. These words can include not only your novel, but any kind of plans or drafts relating to your story. For me, these 1,667 words include every single word I write that month. Emails? Yup. Writing I’ve done for work? You bet. A particularly long Facebook message to a friend? Oh yeah, throw it in there, rack up that word count. If I’ve had a typed conversation with you during a November over the past three years, I’d like to thank you personally for helping me reach my word count.

Some people would call this cheating; “You’re only supposed to include your designated NaNoWriMo work in your word count!” they cry. And I hear you, my friends, I do. But 1,667 words isn’t something you can just churn out in half an hour; maybe you can for the first few days when you’re full of ideas and really enthusiastic, but that number is very likely to go down after the first week. In order to produce 1,667 words every single day, you need to dedicate a significant amount of time each day not only to writing your piece, but also to thinking about it and figuring out what that day’s words will be.

I’ve never had personal friends who managed to keep in line with the NaNoWriMo chart- it didn’t even happen in this stock image I found. The only person I’ve ever personally heard of reaching the 50,000 word goal was a professional author, who was probably pumping out a similar number of words regardless of what month it was. Am I alone in this? Do most people manage to reach 50,000 words in thirty days without counting everything they write? I’ve found that if I really push myself, I can produce about 1,000 words every day, but then the project loses all of its fun. I lead a life that is fairly busy but would still be considered to contain an average amount of activity, and every November I find myself wondering how people find the time and energy to do NaNoWriMo “properly”.

I like to use NaNoWriMo to make me a better writer and encourage me to write more than I usually would, no matter how many projects the 50,000 word count is spread over. I think that the point of NaNoWriMo is to help your writing and so if this is what works for me, I’m going to keep doing it. I know that I’m more likely to keep up NaNoWriMo for the entire month if I do ten 5,000 word projects, so why shouldn’t I? If you take part in NaNoWriMo, how do you do it, and how do you keep yourself writing when life takes up all of your time?