2020 NaNoWriMo cumulative word total by day
I did my first National Novel Writing Month in 2003, during my first semester of college, and it was so hard I didn’t come back for eight years. Then that year was so hard I didn’t even hit 50k. Looking back, I’m astonished I came back for a third time. But I did, determined to get back into writing when I was grappling with depression and deep unhappiness, and that was the NaNo that really mattered, because it was the year I met my friends.
NaNo is so much easier when you’re not alone.
The first year I did NaNo, it was still early enough that only two or three other people on my college campus were participating, and I never managed to get together with them. The second time I did NaNo, there were no write-ins in my town, so I used that as an excuse not to attend any. My third year, there still weren’t any write-ins in my town, but I decided that I had to go to at least one, to try it out. I waited until the last week of NaNo to finally make the trek over to a local mall about forty minutes away in traffic. Meeting other writers was so fun, I couldn’t believe I’d waited so long. I was back at another write-in the following night, and then at another write-in on the last day of the month. Fortunately, I made enough of an impression to earn an invite to meet up with some other writers come January.
Since then, my writing group and I have all done NaNo together every November. (I didn’t officially participate last year, splitting time between writing some backstory and launching my secret project, so I could still spend time with everyone.) As our writing has matured, we’ve treated the month differently, sometimes not bothering to aim for 50k. I’ve worked on eight projects over the ten NaNos, with a couple years of repeats. One year I outlined what I hope to one day turn into a comic script. This year, I alternated between working on a rewrite of my very first NaNoNovel and my current WIP Beauty and the Beast retelling. In the end, I wrote about 28,000 words on my WIP and 23,000 on the fun rewrite project.
