It’s November 30th again, and if you’re like me and participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), hopefully you’re finishing up your 50,000 words you need for the win. If not, you’re still a winner in a way, because you tried! This was my sixth NaNoWriMo, and each year, I learned something new. So if you didn’t get to 50k, that’s okay! Here’s what I learned in six years of NaNoWriMos (and four wins).
2014
I won my first NaNoWriMo! It was my second fanfiction novel and fourth longer work overall (the first three I think are technically novellas). Even though it’s published on Archive of Our Own to this day, it’s probably terrible. But you know what? I finished. After wanting to write since elementary school, I had never written a story of this length before.
2015 – First “Failure”
This year, I attempted to write original fiction (as opposed to fanfiction). I didn’t have a plan, only got past the magical 1,666 words on three days, only wrote 7,652 words total, and stopped writing on day 8. Even though I didn’t win, that’s okay! I’m not really a pantser.
2016 – Second “Failure”
This year, I made it a whole seven days before giving up, but I wrote more on each typical day. Writing the story was like pulling teeth though. I wrote a little over 10,000 words though.
That January, I had started writing a fanfic called Like Normal People. I wrote 13 chapters, stopped when we moved, and then forgot about it. I didn’t write for nearly the entire year.
2017
I didn’t even attempt NaNoWriMo. I don’t think I wrote any fiction that entire year. I’m not 100% sure though, but at this point I didn’t know if I was capable of writing an actual full-length novel. My dreams of being a writer shriveled up.
It’s funny though, because even though I didn’t write fiction, that didn’t mean I didn’t write. I wrote journal entries (lots of these). Blog posts. At some point very early in 2018, I realized that I was writing, even though I wasn’t writing for publication. If I was going to write anyway, why not write towards my dream?
2018
2018 was a very productive year, even though I was working “part time,” which often amounted to between 30 and 36 hours a week. Way more than I wanted to be writing. A very lovely person commented on Like Normal People, hoping I’d finish it. This was at the same time that I felt compelled to write Saving Adelinetta, which is still only 2/3rds done but is partially published on AO3. I wrote five short stories, one of them which was “Happy Birthday,” and two novellas.
I wrote the fanfic “Happy Birthday” on April 22. That summer, I was planning on writing a story for NaNoWriMo again. It was going to be based on the English civil war, but with a Russian feel to it. In August, I had a vision to change the characters from my story “Happy Birthday,” add elves and magic, and turn it into a full length novel. This became my second NaNoWriMo win. I ended up incorporating the original story I was going to write into the backstory for what is now THE BRIGHTNESS OF SHADOW, which I’m going to start querying tomorrow.
2019
After the previous year, I knew to plan more thoroughly for NaNoWriMo. I wrote a fanfic novel earlier in the year and then won NaNoWriMo with my… still untitled book. Yes, I wrote the 50,000 words I needed for my 3rd win, but the story seemed to go off the rails. I love the characters and the idea of this story, it just wasn’t well thought out enough. But you know what? I learned that I could write another original novel this year. And someday, I hope to go back and rewrite this story, with more planning.
2020
I started planning THE BALLAD OF COCONUTS AND SNAKES in the summer of 2019. This was the first book I wrote a query to before starting the book. I had no idea how I was going to write the book at the time, because the original query had amorphous ideas of a guy being held by a god on a desert island and being rescued by a girl (I had to edit this to avoid spoilers), but I had a general idea of how this would turn out before the month began. And this became my fourth NaNoWriMo win.
I’m not sure if this will be a single book or a duology. It has a natural breaking point in the middle, but I’m an underwriter and at this point, I’m not sure it will be long enough to make two books. Since I know the basics of the entire twoish-book story, I’m going to go ahead and write the first draft of both halves of the book and then just edit what I think will be book 1 before querying. And I think this one will reach the query stage too.
So that’s been my NaNoWriMo journey so far. If you’ve won this year, wonderful! But if you gave up, or didn’t make it to 50k, that’s okay too. We’re all growing in our writing journey and if you didn’t do it this year, or aren’t happy with your story, try again next year! The more you write, the more confidence you have that you’ll be able to do it again. At one point, I never thought I’d be able to write a novel at all, even though I desperately wanted to.