National Novel Writing Month is over.

A month ago, I decided to attempt the standard NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words. 50,000 words is not the same thing as a novel. For perspective, Gatsby and Slaughterhouse V are both about 50k words. War and Peace is something like half a million words.

What that means is, if you achieve the standard NaNoWriMo goal, you’ve written somewhere between a whole novel, and about a tenth of a novel. Industry standard is about 70k to 100k words. Most NaNoWriMo finishers, therefore, have not actually finished a novel. Although some do. And it’s possible, though difficult, to write more than 50k words in a month. My record is 73k, which I set in April 2020, during Covid.

It was Covid that enabled me to put up such numbers. I knew that, distressed as everyone was (me included) I could get away with letting schoolwork slide. Jamie and I were also living outside of New York City at the time, in a quiet part of New Jersey called Egg Harbor Township. Everything was closed. It was a great time to be a writer if you weren’t having a nervous breakdown, which I eventually was. But not before I set that sweet personal record of 73 thousand words.

I was working at that time on the third draft of what became Mosquito Wings. (Mosquito Wings is 97k words, and I aspire to cut it down to about 90).

This month was not quite as conducive to huge writing days as April 2020. I teach now, I can only goof off so much on my schoolwork, and unfortunately, I have a loving group of friends who are always inviting me to go bowling.

Nevertheless, I won NaNoWriMo. On November 30^th, I reached 50,462 words in my first draft of The Minesweeper Diaries. I feel like a reached an exciting, emotional midpoint climax in the book, too. In revisions, I expect to cut a lot of material so that the most recent scenes I’ve written don’t take quite so long for the reader to reach.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the benefits of the NaNoWriMo Winners’ Circle. Not really. The benefits are just discounts for programs like Scrivener, which I’m reluctant to use. Maybe I’m just a luddite.

You also get to write your name and the name of your project in a database of other NaNoWriMo writers—and there are many of them. I won’t lie to you, I got a kick out of some of the names of the novels in the Winners’ Circle. My favorite was The Tales of Braggodan, Son of Brachmir. I would pay a hundred dollars to read that novel.

And finally, there’s a sweet NaNoWriMo certificate that, for some reason, has a leopard on it.

Even though this all sounds silly, NaNoWriMo was a spark to my writing process. It really pushed me. And it’s cool to go from idea to half of a novel in only one month. It was a nice reminder that, yes, when you’re starting a new project, there will be many things that you don’t know, but if you write anyway, some of the answers will occur to you in the moment.

It takes confidence to write. You say, I don’t know how to write this scene. I don’t know this character’s motivation. I don’t know what makes this villain villainous. And it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ll never figure out the answers to these questions, or that, at the keyboard, your brain will fail you. Sometimes my brain does fail me. But other times, a scene will almost write itself, the characters will be in great tension, I will know just what to make the characters do, and the consequences of their actions will spark new scenes and show me where my story needs to go.

Until next time.