On NaNoWriMo and Why We Fail It

Welcome back, and thank you for reading Writtle. My little writing blog.

It’s November which is a sort of ‘Duh’ month for writers. For those not a regular part of the writing community: NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November each year since 1999. The challenge is to write fifty-thousand words, the approximate minimum length of a novel over 31 days.

NaNoWriMo has had an increase of thirty thousand documented participants on average from 2013 to 2018. Yet, as these numbers of beginning participation have increased the number of completing participants has remained at an average of 11%. The number of completing people increased because of increased participants, yes, but shouldn’t the number of completing people grow exponentially as a result of increased participation? Obviously the answer is no, but I had to ask. It can’t because the same percentage of a large party of people aren’t going to complete fifty-thousand words in thirty-one days with it being a random habit as result of a new month.

Being a new reader of James Clear’s Atomic Habits I understand, though knew before, why 89% of people give up. I knew beforehand that they thought it was too hard. They started and their idea didn’t live up to their expectations. They showed it to a friend and their friend shot it down because they don’t write and don’t understand the difficulties of a first draft, no, of a rough draft.

(NaNoWriMo likely has some of the roughest possible drafts that are available to humanity. Especially without predetermined planning of the story, one who jumps straight into writing without at least a clear, sentence-long idea is going to fail. However, most people without an idea will likely not participate at all.)

The first draft of anything is [crap], said Ernest Hemingway. It is impossible for a first effort to be anything but a failure, yet we place all this pressure on perfection. The problem is this: we don’t see the process behind the books we read, even when explained, it is a foreign process to our minds. James Clear outlines this in his Atomic Habits: often we set a goal without having a system. Our goals should be like a scoreboard; looking at it scores no points. It is the system by which we get something done that establishes the goal, creating a habit that gets us at least 1% of the way to the goal each day. Without setting a system up to manage the path to the goal of (maybe say) one thousand words a day, which isn’t the required amount, but when a habit is hard we devoid it subconsciously.

Setting a time, and a space to write can greatly increase writing there. A room without your phone or any distractions, and a time without any distractions. Maybe you have a long lunch break. Saying or writing down, I will write after I finish my sandwich and clean up after myself, is a key way to remind yourself. Then, after you finish the sandwich, you walk to the space (environment) and time you’ve designated to write, and you write until your lunch break is over. Doing this every day, you will have a story in what has seemed like a blur. Because you shouldn’t observe your current progress, but where the trend of your progress will go if you maintain it. One thousand on One thousand on One thousand on some more, and you have one or two chapters of a story. You have a beginning.

I’ve likely watched a hundred writing advice videos or more, and something the professionals, the highly published are always saying, is something like this: it’s all about getting the story onto the page. If you never write it, all the planning is for nought. You might not even have to plan if you just chip away at that block of granite every day, eventually before you is a rough, but clearly definable statue, left to be clarified, cleaned, and glossed in a shining ointment made ready for the audience to see.

Thank you for reading, and you’re always welcome back every Wednesday for another post.