This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Warner. Episode 27, NaNoWriMo, and you. Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day, I’m your host, Sarah Warner. And I just had a wonderful week and it wasn’t because it was free from pressure or stress or anxiety, or even because I got the chance to write a billion words every day, because I didn’t. Rather, my week was great because of all of the really lovely emails and notes that I received from listeners like you. Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for giving me such an amazing week.

One listener in particular sent me an email that I would like to read to you because she shares a really good quote with some really good insights. And so this is a note from podcast listener, Kathy and Kathy writes. “I was listening to a radio show on NPR called Queue. The moderator was interviewing Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love. She was talking about creativity and what happens when you ignore your creativity. She has written an entire book about it. And as a side note, this book is called Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. And it is available in bookstores as of September, 2015. So just a little plug there.

Kathy continues. “She said that having a creative mind is like having a border collie. You’d better give that dog something to do, or it’s going to find something to do, and you’re not going to like what it does. You need to keep it occupied or it’ll do something like eat the couch.” She quoted someone who said that unused creativity is not benign. If you don’t use it, it doesn’t just sit there doing nothing it churns and it’ll find something to do. And that often can lead to depression.

Kathy Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my absolute favorite writers and she’s one of those writers for me, where I don’t clamor to purchase all of her books immediately when they came out. And I was honestly not a huge fan of Eat, Pray Love, and I hope I don’t get a lot of flack for saying that, but I have heard Elizabeth Gilbert speak and she is an incredible speaker for two reasons. First, is that she is smart. She is a smart, smart lady. And second, she is probably one of the most inspirational speakers on writing that I’ve ever heard.

I heard her speak at a TED talk where she talked about your muse, but she also has her own podcast. So if you like podcasts like this one where you’re encouraged to write, and you just get to discover things about yourself and about writing while you listen. Elizabeth Gilbert did a spinoff podcast from the latest book that she published, Big magic, and it’s in the iTunes store. I really encourage you to listen to it. It’s sort of an interview format and she calls up writers and sort of listens to what they’re going through and gives advice. And she is just… She’s an inspiration to me. And she is just an incredible woman and I really hope you enjoy it.

So Cathy, thank you so much for your email. Thank you to everybody else who sent in emails this week. You are all just… You’re so amazing. And I am so blessed too, I don’t know, to have formed a relationship with you through this podcast. Is that weird? Is it weird if I’m like, “Yeah, I have all these awesome people that I know now?” Because that was one of the unexpected things that I got when I started a podcast is I became part of this amazing community of writers who love to write and love to talk about writing and listen to podcasts about writing. And so, boy, I am just so thankful for you.

If you ever do want to send me an email, you can do so at Hello. That’s H-E-L-L-O, at sarahwarner.com, S-A-R-A H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. So you can send an email directly to me there. Otherwise, if you want to go to my website and you navigate over to the contact page, there’s just a little form that you can fill out with your name, your email address, and then you can write me anything that you want, literally, anything that you want. I probably should not say that in a podcast, because one day that’s going to come back and bite me in the butt. But until that happens right away.

Okay. Today I want to talk about a seasonal writing challenge. I think that if you are a writer who spends a lot of time on the internet, like I do, you may have heard of this phenomenon called NaNoWriMo. You may have participated in it before. You may know people who have participated in it before and hey, maybe you have no idea what it is in which case that’s fine because that’s what we’re going to talk about today. But NaNoWriMo is N-A-N-O-W-R-I-M-O. And it’s little segments of the words National Novel Writing Month. So November is national novel writing month. And NaNoWriMo is a challenge that lots of people undertake every single year across the globe.

And the challenge that they undertake is that of writing a 50,000 word novel between the dates of November 1st and November 30th. I’m just going to let that sink in. 50,000 words, 30 days, so crazy, but a lot of people get really into it. I think that last year there was about 21,000 winners. And so to win NaNoWriMo, all you have to do is write your 50,000 words within those 30 days. And so a lot of people accomplish that last year. Unfortunately I was not one of them. Oh, Do you hear that? My cats are having a fight. I have an older cat and a younger cat. The older cat is about 13 years old. They had been abused. And so they’re both very territorial. The older one, she likes her space and the younger one of course wants to hang out in her space with her. So, there’s just some inherent difficulties with that relationship, but most of the time they get along really well.

Once in a while, we’ll get some truly terrifying screaming sounds from Madorie, who’s the older one. And then they’re like fine immediately after that. And then we’ll trot away and just hang out on the couch for two hours. So if you ever hear strange screaming in the background of this podcast, I promise, I’m not like a serial killer or anything. It’s just my cats getting into a little cat spat. So NaNoWriMo was started in 2009 by a group of friends who kind of just wanted to encourage each other to write every day, which goes along really well with what I want this podcast to do for you.

And so, essentially, if you want to win NaNoWriMo, you have to write, it comes out to about 1700 words a day. That is a lot of words. But despite the fact that that is a lot of words and for a lot of people that seems a nearly unsurmountable Herculean task, a lot of people really loved that idea. The fact that within 30 days they would have 50,000 words. I mean, yeah, a lot of them would be terrible words because when you’re writing for quantity, a lot of times you sacrifice quality. But I think that that was even part of the original intent of the people who started NaNoWriMo.

They figured that when you make it a habit to write every day, you’re going to write a lot of crap. And we’ve talked about that on this show before, if you write every day, not everything you write is going to be perfect and beautiful and immediately publishable. You’re going to write well on some days and you’re going to write terribly on other days. And so I think part of this program is to just get you comfortable with getting out the bad stuff, as well as the good stuff. And to making your peace with everything that you produce, even and especially if you are a perfectionist who tries to put up a strainer that only lets the good words out and keeps the bad words and ideas inside. That just doesn’t work, break the dam, let it all out because you’ve got 30 days in which to write 50,000 words.

I spoke earlier about the 20,000 ish people who won NaNoWriMo last year. A lot of the people who won wrote really terrible novels, but there have also been several very good novels to come out of NaNoWriMo, including several best sellers, such as Sarah Gruen’s, Water For Elephants, which was made into movies, starring Reese Witherspoon, the Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Wool by Hugh Howey, The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan, Don’t Let Me Go by J.H Trumble, Fan Girl by Rainbow Rowell, The God Patent by Ransom Stephens, and many more actually. It was actually kind of surprising.

You may have read some of these books and you may not have read any of them or you may have read all of them. I have no idea. So I feel comfortable telling you that I first started doing NaNoWriMo about nine years ago in 2006. I was living alone in a small garden apartments downtown Chicago. At that time, I just had one of my cats, Madori, and not a lot of friends or things to do. And so I figured it was a great time and a just a great opportunity to try my hand at NaNoWriMo. The first couple of days, I was really good about meeting the 1,700 ish word count, but then I got to a point where I was also working a full time job. So I was maybe just drained from a day at work. And so I skipped a day and in a composition like this in a challenge like this, you really have to pick up the slack if you drop it accidentally.

And so the next day, instead of 1,700 words, I was responsible for writing 3,400 words. So the problem with this is that if you miss one day, it really snowballs because then the next day, if you miss that 3,400 word day, then the next day you have to write… I’m not even going to pretend that I can do the math in my head that quickly, but you get the idea. And I got to a point where I was like 6,000 words behind or 12,000 words behind it. And I kept trying, but I never was able to get that 50,000 words. I tried it again every year after that because I was really determined. I was like, you know what, I’m a writer. And if I can’t do this, then I have no right to call myself a writer if I can’t write a whole novel in 30 days.

I was a little less… I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to say intelligent back then, but a little less understanding of what it means to be a writer and how the world works and how life works in general. So we can blame my youth on that. So I tried it the next year and the next year. And every year, I was working a series of office jobs at this time. And so the people whom I worked with did not consider themselves writers really, but still I saw this as like an evangelism thing. I was like, “Oh, man, I’m going to recruit so many people and they’re going to find their creativity and it’s going to be amazing. And we’re all going to talk about these novels we’re writing and it’s just, oh, I can’t wait.”

And so every year before I started NaNoWriMo, I would send out an email to probably 90% of the people I had ever met in my entire life, including the people that I now worked with in my office jobs. And I would say, “Hey, the time is upon us. And that time is November, and November is national novel writing month. National novel writing month or NaNoWriMo as it is called by some on the internet is a sort of marathon for writers where you write 50,000 words, 30 days, no mercy who’s with me. And then it was just crickets after that.

And once in a while, I’d get back a response that was like, “Hey, thanks for thinking of me, but no thanks.” And so every year inevitably I would do this alone and people would ask like, “Oh, hey, are you doing that crazy writing thing?” And I would say, “Yep,” even though inevitably, every single year I was behind by like the second week. And I had really, with how busy my life was, I had no chance of catching up. That was nine years ago. And up until last year, I was still doing that thing where I’d say like, “Hey, I’m doing NaNoWriMo.” New people that I work with at this new job, do it with me. It’ll be super fun. And I still don’t have anyone to do it with me.

And I think I’m still inevitably going to fail, but you know what, I’m okay with that. And I’m okay with that for a couple of reasons. This is by no means an attempt to persuade you to join me and doing NaNoWriMo. I understand that you are probably busy enough doing your own thing, but hey, if you want to, I’ll link my information in my profile on NaNoWriMo and you can sign up or friend me or what have you. But reasons that I think that NaNoWriMo is worthwhile. The first one perhaps obviously is that it encourages people to consider doing something that they would not have considered doing before.

I firmly believe that every person I have ever met in my entire life has a story to tell, you have a story to tell. And a lot of people don’t let that story out. And as Cathy sent me earlier in that quote, all that creative energy, what is that doing to you if you’re not letting out that story, if you’re not releasing that creative energy. I’ve talked about writing and self care before, and I really believe that it’s healthy to write and that it’s necessary to get that story out and to tell your story. So I love that NaNoWriMo, even just plants that idea in people’s minds.

I also love the fact that it establishes the importance of writing every day. Now this comes good and bad. It encourages you to write every day, which is awesome, but it also encourages you to write 1,700 words every day, which, that’s a lot, that’s more than I can handle with my schedule. And I can freely admit that now, now that I’m a rational adult who understands how the world works, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still write every day in the spirit of NaNoWriMo. I can maybe divided it by 10 and write 170 words a day, or 250 words a day, or even a thousand words a day.

So that’s what I’m doing this year for NaNoWriMo. I’m personalizing my challenge a little bit, and I know I’m not going to get a 50,000 word novel at the end of 30 days. And I’m okay with that. I’m just resetting the expectations for myself, knowing what’s possible. So I’m going to shoot for 170 words a day throughout the month of November. And if I write more than that, that is awesome. But the important part is that I will be challenging myself to write every day.

A couple more features that I really like about NaNoWriMo are the inspirational letters that get sent out once a week. They’re just emails from NaNoWriMo when you sign up on the website, you kind of give them your email and give them permission to send these to you, but they are really cool. And there are a lot of really cool, inspirational messages that get shared from writers that I really admire. I remember several years ago, they had one from Garth Nix, who is the author of Sabriel, one of my top 10 favorite books of all time. And I just read and reread that email and felt like Garth Nix was personally cheerleading me on to writing victory. And I was like, “This is amazing. This is worth it.”

NaNoWriMo is free by the way, I probably should have mentioned that earlier. It’s free to participate. Other writers they featured in the past have been Neil Gaiman, John Green, Jim Butcher, Lemony Snicket, Phillip Pullman, Dave Eggers, Walter Dean Myers, James Patterson, Veronica Roth. I mean the list really goes on and on and on. And I kind of took a sneak peek at the writers that they’re going to have write inspirational emails this year. And it’s a really good list. It includes N.K Jemisin, Diana Gabaldon and many, many more. So I’m really stoked. NaNoWriMo’s URL is nanowrimo.org. That’s N-A-N-O-W-R-I-M-O.org. And you can go to the inspiration tag and just see all of the past inspirational emails there. So, they are really cool to read through.

Another thing that I really appreciate about the NaNoWriMo community is that there are forums available. And so depending on what kind of novel that you’re writing or what kind of book you’re using NaNoWriMo is an excuse trade. So if you’re writing creative nonfiction, or nonfiction, or biography or autobiography or your memoirs, or what have you, you can access forums with like-minded writers who are writing similar things to you. And so a couple of years ago, I was writing a novel that took place in 1811. And so I had all of these questions. What kind of floors would their Manor have? What would the lighting situation be in this house in 1811? Would they be using candles or argand lamps or whatever?

And so these forums were really great place to go. I joined the historical novel forum and then I joined the appropriate one for the setting of my novel. And so it’s just a really cool way to get your questions answered by a large community of like-minded people. I cannot 100% personally vouch for the quality of the answers you will get back. However, I’m sure that many of you are probably familiar with forums, which are moderated, but not necessarily fact checked. So while you might get some great answers or some great ideas from forums, please do know that the information you received has not have been in fact checked or edited or anything like that. And it is still your responsibility as a writer to get all your facts straight. So just a little caveat there.

I want to temper all of this enthusiasm with a few reasons that NaNoWriMo is maybe not a great idea. While NaNoWriMo is really great for people who want to write every day, it’s less great about making sure that you are still reading every day. I’ve spoken before about how important and essential it is for writers to read probably as much as they’re writing. And if you are churning out 1,700 words a day, in addition to a full time job or whatever else you have going on in your life, I’m going to guess that that does not leave you a ton of time for reading. And I’ve noticed that when I write without reading, it’s really easy to get lost, to lose direction, to lose focus, to become ungrounded.

If you’re going to aim for 1,700 words a day, that’s awesome. But see if you can still fit in some reading time there, I think I’ve used this metaphor in the past, but a writer who doesn’t read is like a cook who doesn’t eat food or taste what they’re cooking. It gives you much needed perspective and enlarges your vocabulary. It keeps your brain active. Reading is just so essential. So please do not neglect your reading while you are doing NaNoWriMo.

The other thing about NaNoWriMo is that NaNoWriMo is build as this building up encouraging beacon of ideas and possibility. And I love that. I love that about NaNoWriMo. I love that it shows people possibilities that they had not considered for themselves before. But there’s also this reality that goes alongside it. And that is that winning NaNoWriMo might not be possible for everyone. And in fact, just from my last nine years of experience doing NaNoWriMo or attempting to do NaNoWriMo, I think that what I’ve learned is that for the average hardworking American, who puts in 40 hours a week at a job and maybe has a family to take care of writing 1700 words a day, not super feasible, but I don’t want to discourage you from trying NaNoWriMo just because you won’t “win” by their standards of having written 50,000 words in 30 days. That doesn’t mean that you still can’t benefit from it. And that’s really what I want to highlight here.

I want to go back to the fact that the greatest thing about NaNoWriMo is that it helps you build a habit of writing every day, no matter how much you’re writing, if it’s 170 words, or if it’s 1,700 words, it encourages writers everywhere to develop the habit of writing every day. And I think that that is amazing and invaluable. So what I would encourage you to do, and this is what I am doing myself, is sign up for NaNoWriMo, temper your expectations. I mean, if you have a situation where you can churn out 1,700 words a day, that is awesome and you should do it. And let me know how it turns out and maybe even send me your novel and I’ll read it.

But for those of us who are sometimes life gets in the way for us temper your expectations, move the bar down just a little bit and take it as a challenge to write creatively every day. You can still enjoy using the forums. You can still enjoy the weekly inspirational emails you’ll get and just enjoy being part of a community of writers who are there to encourage one another and build each other up as we all take a big collective word dump together. Boy, I could have ended that a lot more eloquently. Let’s let’s try that again. As we all write through the words, good and bad and tell our stories together. Once again, you can find NaNoWriMo, national novel writing month online at nanowrimo.org. That’s N-A-N-O-W-R-I-M-O.org. You can sign up for free.

If you end up signing up or creating an account, or if you already have one, I would love to be NaNoWriMo buddies with you. You can find me at… Okay, so when I originally signed up for NaNoWriMo, I used the pen name that I was writing under, which is Juneva Spragg, J-U-N-E-V-A S-P-R-A-G-G. I will link to that as well in today’s show notes. This week’s book of the week is The Gathering by Kelly Armstrong. I have to tell you, I love Kelly Armstrong. I first read the novel Bitten back when I was in high school, maybe, and it was about werewolves and it was fun and well-written, and there was a great mystery and I just really liked the characters. And so I kind of became addicted to her books.

She mostly writes for adults and recently has started writing for young adults. And I was like, “Oh, boy, more Kelly Armstrong to read.” And so I picked up The Gathering, which is the first book in her Darkness Rising series for young adults. And it features kind of your normal teenage paranormal romance rules. There is a 16 year old girl living in an ordinary town with ordinary parents. And everything is very ordinary except that it’s not. Her name is Maya and she is adopted and I won’t give away too much.

It starts to come out that several of the teenagers in this town are maybe unusual or special. And you kind of know the drill. I really loved the main character Maya and I love that she is a more diverse character and that she is well-written and fun and smart and interesting. She’s not just another Bella or another clueless simpering girl who follows guys around. She’s actually, well-rounded, interesting and very, very capable character. And I loved that. I also really liked her parents who were smart and funny and not sort of your typical clueless, Y.A literature parents. They were in tune with their daughter and they had a little bit of depth to them as well. And so I really appreciated that.

I think the main thing that I noticed when I was reading this book is despite the strength of the characters, the plot didn’t go anywhere. And I think that this is because this is intended to be a trilogy or maybe an entire series. I have no idea, but you definitely get the feeling that what you’re reading is not a complete story. And that was really frustrating for me. I got to the end of the book and you had met the characters and they had interacted and there is a hint that something was going to happen. And then the book ends with nothing resolved. And I admire when cliffhangers are done well, but this wasn’t even a cliffhanger because you didn’t have a cliff to stand on or hang off of, this was the first part of a complete book. And so I felt like I had just read the beginning third or quarter of a story and it was very unsatisfying. So it kind of left me at the altar. And I was like, “Where’s the rest of the story?”

And I was not motivated enough. I feel like it was a teaser. With the teaser that I was given, I feel like it wasn’t enough to really hook me. And so, while I was interested in Maya, I was not interested in buying the next 17,000 books to have a very slowly revealed story, very slowly revealed to me. So if you like young adult paranormal romance, you may enjoy this installation. If you enjoy strong female characters who are not mopey or imbecilic or chasing after guys without their own thoughts in their brains, then this might be a good read for you. I mean, I really loved the main character, but story-wise, meh. Once again, that is The Gathering by Kelly Armstrong. The first in the Darkness Rising trilogy? Series? Not really sure.

So one of the hindrances to me doing NaNoWriMo this year is not just the fact that I’m crazy busy, but I’m also going to be out of the country for the first week in November. And no, I’m not going on some fabulous vacation or anything like that. I’m actually leading a mission trip to the mountains of Jamaica and will be working with a village for the deaf there in Jamaica. There’s an overall 50% unemployment rate, but when it comes to the deaf, that rate raises to about 85%. And so there’s a village there that sort of teaches skills and trades and encourages them to learn sign language and become part of a community. And so I will be going out to this village. People kind of give me a little flack for this and say like, “Oh, Jamaica, you’re really going to be suffering,” but all of Jamaica is not like you see on the resorts.

The interior of Jamaica is very much a third world country. I mean, it’s a beautiful place, and this is part of why I love it. It’s a beautiful place and it’s a terrible place. And it’s just really… It just resonates with you when you’re there about how life can be simultaneously, just wonderful and tear you apart at the same time. And so I’ll also be working at an orphanage and an infirmary, and I’m leading the trip this year, which I’m really excited about. This is going to be my third year going. And so wish me luck please. And so if you do send me an email or a letter or something sometime in the first week of November, 2015, I will not be answering it until I return in the second week of November. So just FYI, I’m not ignoring you. I am literally unable to check my email.

So I’m still going to try to write every day, but whether it’s for my novel or in like a personal journal, kind of chronicling the mission trip will be yet to be seen. I am grateful to so many people for your support of this show. Notably, I would like to thank my patreon supporters, including official cool cat, Sean Locke, official rad dude, Andrew Coons, official bookworm, Rebecca Warner, as well as listener Gordon Tillman, who has recently started donating via PayPal. Any and all donations are used to keep this podcast going. Sponsors like you help me cover hosting costs and just all of the time that I put into each episode. So thank you so much for supporting me and for making this podcast a possibility.

I would also love to thank like Cathy, everyone who has taken the time to write an email or notes passed on my way. Thank you so much for your encouragement. I hope that I’m able to provide that to you as well. So let me know if you are going to be doing NaNoWriMo this year. If you are, that’s great. If you’re not, that’s also great. It might not be a great fit for you and that’s okay. Until next time. This has been the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner. And I just think you are awesome.