Confessions from an Anxious Mind: A NaNoWriMo Writer's Story - Final Day

I'm currently sitting just shy of 20,000 words; 33,000 away from a blue ribbon finish, but 12,000 words farther than I made it last year. I'm going to make a concerted effort to pump up the volume of words in the remaining 8 hours.

However, I still have two items to take away regardless of how many words I finish with: 1) the group behind NaNoWriMo, the Office of Light and Letters, does fantastic things throughout the year to help writers and champion the future successors of the written word with their Young Writer's Program (which, incidentally, contributed a Dare Machine to NaNoWriMo that led me to construct one of my favorite passages of my story). 2) I have a lot of groundwork laid for a story and characters I'm supremely interested in continue to work through. I'm going to spend some time after I send in my final manuscript for word tally really breaking out a working outline to give more structure and guidance to this project.

Confessions from an Anxious Mind: A NaNoWriMo Writer's Story - Week 3

How to go about adjusting expectations? I wasn't as able as I expected to freeze my life; in fact, my commitment recently increased, so setting aside space to write has been a Tetrisian time-management challenge. I've spent much of the last week falling asleep with my fingers dangling over the keyboard, waking up with streams of nonsense garble all over my computer screen. I've decided to play fair and delete those unconscious sentences, even if they contribute to my overall word counts, and am currently sitting just above 15,000 words.

So, the expectation-setting. 50,000 words, the ultimate goal and what would launch me into the upper pantheon of WriMos is more daunting than anticipated and trying to accomplish that will just produce more negatively impacting anxiety. I've pulled back to striving for 30,000 words, a more reasonable endgame with just eight days to go, and more exciting a trial for the upcoming holiday weekend.

My story has begun to take shape, too. It's flattening out into chapters and sections, the characters have purpose and conflict, and the vignettes tying the central plot together seem relevant and interesting to the themes of family, upbringing and identity I'm exploring with this novel. So bring on Turkey Day and I'll stuff myself full of words and motivation to push forward to my (revised) goal.

Confessions from an Anxious Mind: A NaNoWriMo Writer's Story - Week 1

I had a plan. I was going to start at 11pm on October 31st: harvest some plot ideas, plant some seeds of character and reap some stalks of subject matter so that I could chow down on the fruits of prose come midnight. But even the best laid plans–and this was not one of them–can go awry, and so it ended up being 12:30am on November 1st when I launched full-force into my National Novel Writing Month endeavor. Which is actually more true to the spirit of NaNoWriMo, working in the moment and removing the bonds of self-censorship.

In that first sprint, I employed nearly 400 words, inventing less than 1% of them. After 3 days, I am now perched at 3,200 of the eventual 50,000 I hope to acquire. Currently, I don't have any significant plot developments, no real "story" to speak of–it's mainly character sketches and small moments, which is suitable coming from a short story background and having consumed that medium as a reader for the past few weeks. But that is the appeal of NaNo: freedom to write the way you want with the impetus to write more of it. I'm braving the impending storm of brain fatigue and laptop eyestrain, and I look forward to sharing more of the ongoing madness.