On Completing NaNoWriMo 2018
While I like the idea of challenges, I’m wary of taking part in them. First off, I’m notoriously bad at sticking to a schedule. A challenge implies regular progress and milestones, and my usual way of approaching that is to work assiduously the first few days, procrastinate the next few days, procrastinate on the initially procrastinated work the next few days, and continue thus. At the same time, there’s a perfectionist in me that hates shoddy or unfinished work, and with every day of procrastination the perfectionist prods me a little harder with the trident of self-loathing and compels me to start the new day with a promise to finally make up for all the lost time. And of course, I procrastinate that day as well. As the challenge progresses, therefore, my inner perfectionist and my inner procrastinator end up tussling in a war that both sides lose — I end up never completing the challenge, and loathing myself for it.
Until this year, when I signed up for NaNoWriMo.
NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, is a non-profit that challenges writers worldwide to complete the monumental challenge of writing a 50000-word novel in 30 days. I say monumental because it truly is. Modern-day writers often find it hard to write even 500 words daily, and churning out a 50000-word novel in 30 days — translating to about 1667 words per day, not counting all the ideation time requires — would be tough for most people! And yet, every year, thousands of people from all over the world and all walks of life pledge to complete the challenge and commence November with a blank sheet and a mind raring to go. Some finish the challenge, some don’t, but all accomplish something, which is the creation of a novel that didn’t exist before, no matter how many words they write in those 30 days.
And that’s what matters, I told myself, as I made my pledge and sorted out the notes I had scribbled for my plot idea. Even if I don’t complete #NaNoWriMo2018, I will have written something, and that’s obviously better than nothing!
Except, for me, something wasn’t better than nothing.
And that wasn’t merely my perfectionism talking. That was my writing dream talking, the dream for which I had quit my job four months ago and stepped into the wide world to make a name for myself with my words.
Right after my last day on the job, I had done what people in books and magazines do. I moved to a new city, taken an Airbnb flat for a month and started writing every day. I was doing what I had always longed to have done, and I was exhilarated. Except that it wasn’t quite working out. No matter how hard I tried to build up my plot and make a goodish chunk of progress every day, I kept getting stuck. Plot holes showed up that refused to get resolved, and flourishes of language led to gaping inconsistencies. My old characters refused to act in character, and my new characters refused to act at all. And my plot — a multi-generational murder mystery — started out with a superb premise but petered out into a conclusion that was watery, dull, unsatisfying and inconclusive.
I struggled on, of course, building a set of notes that somehow never seemed to grow beyond a point, and managed to churn out a couple of decent chapters. Then I started work at a start-up that advocated a six-day week, so goodbye to weekends and long leisure hours. The novel sat on my table, untouched for the present, while I hoped that the answers to the problems would come to me in my sleep. But they didn’t. They merely sat there, impassive, uncompromising, unworkable. And yet I kept my hopes up, telling myself that my creativity had taken a hit from the stress of the new job, and I would be fine once I settled down.
And then something happened at work that forced me to quit my job when I wasn’t ready to. All of a sudden, I had all the time in the world. And while much of it was devoted to job seeking, I did give my novel a good try — a really good try — and had a harsh moment of truth.
At this point, this particular novel was not going to happen. It wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t ready.
On the other hand, there was a germ of a new idea, just a teeny tiny germ, not much more than a setting and a couple of sentences, that had come to me, quite literally, when I was in the shower — an idea that could, possibly, be expanded into a cracker of a novel.
And, as it so happened, NaNoWriMo 2018 was just around the corner.
I signed up almost on a whim, prompted by the cheery emails that started coming in from the NaNoWriMo team (email marketing really does work!). I added an author bio and gave my novel a random name that would suit almost any genre — although under ‘genre’ I added ‘literary’, because I knew that my novel would be grand and lofty and beautiful in scope. I developed a plot — a fully chalked-out plot, with the sequence of events properly lined out, so that there wouldn’t be any scope for me to ditch the plot on account of a weak ending — and fleshed it out, adding character quirks and dialogues and deeper meanings and lyrical descriptions and hoping all the while that I wasn’t investing myself in another failure.
October 31 arrived, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. To stay in the zone, I documented my feelings about attempting NaNoWriMo and created a new folder on my laptop for all the chapters I would be writing. When midnight finally came, I leapt into the first chapter with a will, having prepared notes on it beforehand, and gave myself a mental high-five. For better or for worse, I had begun!
What followed was a long and arduous month, the details of which no one deserves to hear or read about. Suffice it to say that on the 29th of November, one whole day before the deadline, I pasted the text of my writing into the validator on the NaNoWriMo website and received an official confirmation — in the form of a downloadable certificate — that I had successfully completed NaNoWriMo 2018.
I can’t pinpoint the reason why this worked out. It certainly wasn’t a steady process. There were days I wrote nothing, days I cursed myself for ever attempting this in the first place, days I just wanted giving up. Much of my writing was done on the go, on my phone, the text emailed to myself and then copy-pasted onto a Microsoft Word document. I worked on different sections at random, switching from middle chapter to epilogue and back again, and compiled at least 10000 words worth of “background” that I would divide in bits across the entire book. It was, in short, a chaotic process, and much of what I churned out is amateurish rambling that no self-respecting writer would ever put into a final manuscript.
What kept me going, I think, was the fact that this, really, was my final shot at getting my first novel down on paper. NaNoWriMo had a fixed deadline attached — November 30, EOD. There were milestones to be achieved every day, and badges to be earned along the way. Self-assigned deadlines hadn’t really worked for me, NaNoWriMo wouldn’t happen for another year, and I wouldn’t be a freelancer forever. So I had only this month to get the job done.
As for why I needed to write a novel at all at this point — well, that’s what I know I was born to do. Write novels that speak to the heart and sing to the intellect. And I didn’t want to wait any further — for more money, for more experience, for more education, for more whatever. There would be no magical moments to seize — I would have to create my own moment and work my own magic.
And that’s what I did.
Imperfectly, messily, incompletely, but it happened.
And when I submitted that draft and downloaded my certificate, I felt truer to myself than I ever had before.
Everyone has different reasons to start NaNoWriMo, that go far beyond the obvious one of writing a book. Some do it as an escape from their regular lives, some do it to narrate a real-life story, some do it merely to have something productive to do for 30 days. For me, NaNoWriMo was essential to prove a point. To prove that I had done the right thing by leaving my cushy job and diving into my passion, that one failed novel plot did not mean that a new plot would not come along, that I did have a novel within me that would bloom into completion and become a worthy piece of writing. And the winner’s certificate is, to me, much more than a mere win. It’s a validation of the fact that I was right.
That I am, after all, a writer.
