What is NaNoWriMo? It's National Novel-Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 new words of a novel in November. It usually goes something like this for me, but this year was different—in a lot of ways.
For NaNo 2023, I had three goals, in order.
1) Have fun: don't stress about voice and point of view, don't get bogged down trying to avoid YA taboos, don't be afraid to write scenes that are "just for character development" or don't have explicit scene goals.
2) Stop if my mental health starts to deteriorate.
3) Write 50,000 words.
Did I win? The short answer is yes, but if you're here for the short answer, you're in the wrong place. This blog is for the long answer, which is...like, it's still yes, but with caveats.
What Was Different About NaNo 2023?
1) For the first time EVER, I did not write part of the Fire Faery Trilogy. I've been writing and rewriting the Fire Faery Story since I was twelve years old. I took a long break after high school, started up again for NaNo 2019, and have been at it ever since. Not only does the story now have a lot of baggage, guilt, and stress associated with it, but I was starting to believe that it was the only thing I COULD write. I mean, I haven't tried to write something different in like twelve years. Gabe and Aaron have been encouraging me to write writing something else for a long time, and I finally kind of did.
I wrote the backstory of a FFS character named Kamaria. This may seem like cheating to some people since Kamaria is still a character in the Fire Faery Story, it's the same world, and a few other FFS characters appear in it.
I hear you, but believe me, it was not the Fire Faery Story. It felt like a very different assignment.
2) I did not write every day, and I didn't worry about it. This was huge and absolutely unprecedented for me. Gabe and I went away for a weekend and I didn't write at all on the Saturday, nor did I let that bother me. No guilt. No preoccupation. I did not write that day, and it was fine. I also didn't write any on November 29, the day after I'd hit 50,000 the day before, which brings me to the next thing.
3) I did not max out my word count. Confession time: Hitting 50,000 words alone doesn't usually mean much to me. NaNoWriMo is never really a question of IF I'll win, but by how much. Every year since 2019, I've ended the month with a higher word count than the year before. Sure, the NaNo website and my Facebook page say that the goal is 50,000 words, but I know about the SECRET goal, which is really to surpass the year before. Anything less than that is technically a loss. I've backslidden. I've deteriorated.
As a result, my NaNo progress typically looks something like this:
This year, it looked like this:
This year, a huge part of me is still screaming that while, sure, I got over 50,000 words, I didn't get over 55,875, so how good should I REALLY feel about myself?
I'm working on it.
As a result, I don't feel the sense of relief that I usually feel on December 1, which I am kind of missing. Instead of going from "obsessive and exhausted" to "sweet relief," I'm going from "having a goal I'm casually pursuing" to "not getting to track my progress every day on a chart." It's kind of a bummer.
4) I counted more types of words toward my goal than I usually do. The NaNo rules are somewhat flexible. Some writers count only the words in the manuscript itself, some count their outlines, some don't even believe in hitting Backspace during the month. In the past, I've been a "just the actual manuscript" type of WriMo and I definitely hit Backspace a lot. I have even been known to—*gasp*—EDIT during NaNo, which is universally discouraged.
This year, I gave myself what felt like a truly ridiculous amount of grace. I counted everything I wrote toward the story in November, including outlines, character information, deleted lines, and one embarrassing paragraph of 1,300 words that is not even about the story; it's a stream-of-consciousness brain dump from Thanksgiving night. (Don't worry, I still got over 50,000 words of book-related content, so I still won.)
What Did I Learn?
1) Maybe most importantly, I learned that I still CAN write something other than the Fire Faery Trilogy. It had been twelve years since I'd tried to imagine a new culture and I wasn't sure if I could still be creative in that way. As it turns out, I CAN. What a wonderful surprise to find new colors and customs and languages in my brain just waiting to be uncovered.
2) I can successfully meet a goal without sacrificing my mental health. I don't think I believed this before NaNo this year. Something about my personality was CONVINCED that if I didn't obsess over writing to the exclusion of all else, it wouldn't be enough. Well, that's not true, and now I have to rethink some things.
3) I have issues with expectations of myself. I'm still having a hard time "feeling" like I won NaNo, for many of the above reasons. There just seem to be a lot of asterisks. Gabe insists that not only did I win NaNo, I should feel extra good because I did it while taking care of myself, which ought to be a victory in itself. I hear that, but...it just sounds like a participation trophy.
I'm working on this too XD
4) I think I need a stronger prescription in my glasses. This is pretty self-explanatory, but there is no reason I should need Word to be at 180%.
5) There's something wrong with my relationship with the Fire Faery Story. For the past couple of years, I actually feel sick when I work on it. It's like all of my energy goes to the story instead of to digesting food. If I set a timer and only work on the story for one hour at a time with NO exceptions, it seems to be manageable. I did not have stomach issues while writing Kamaria's backstory for NaNo this year—until it intersected with a character from the main trilogy.
On November 15 I posted on Facebook that my stomach had been doing well so far. The next day, Kamaria encountered a certain character, and from there on out, I did have some issues.
The mind is a powerful thing—too powerful for my taste XD
In addition to all the things I learned about myself and my process, I learned a lot about Kamaria too. I've always known her backstory, but being able to flesh it out was fun and beautiful. I now think that I will publish it one day (this is in the universe where I actually get around to publishing ANY of this), but it'll be a little stand-alone that serves as like Book 2.5 of the trilogy. It will not have a grand "story question" aside from answering the question, "How did she get here and why is she like that?"
In the meantime, Fire Faery groupies can listen to Billie Eilish's "bury a friend" and let their imaginations run wild.
~Stephanie
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