Standards Suffer When You Write an Entire Novel in a Month

This was the first year I ever participated in NaNoWriMo.

Nerds know what NaNoWriMo is. In case you are not a nerd, I will describe it to you (though I have doubts that anyone who is not a nerd reads my blog, except for my Grandma–Hi Grandma!)

NaNoWriMo is the cleverly pronounce-able acronym for National Novel Writing Month. The point of the whole thing is to inspire yourself to write 50,000 words in 30 days. It happens every November. It has happened every November since the dawn of time. And yet, even though I have (to some degree) spent my entire life wanting to be a novelist, this is the first year I attempted it.

And I won. By “won” I mean I successfully wrote 50,000 words (50,112 words, to be exact).

I can say one thing with complete confidence: The novel I wrote is not very good. At least not yet. I intend to go back and make a new outline and rewrite it and, you know, make it good. But that’s not what I want to tell you about in this blog post.

I want to tell you about the graph.

The absolute best part about NaNoWriMo is the graph. It shows you your progress towards achieving your 50,000 word goal with an ideal trend line going right through the middle of it. Literally nothing has ever made me feel more motivated to do anything than that graph made me feel to write every single day in November. When I closed my eyes to fall asleep, I saw the graph.

I mean, look at this! Sheer perfection!

So, you can imagine, when I fell below the trend line I had a bit of what one might call a FREAK OUT.

Seriously, look at this S**T!

There was a week where I was sick and I had 3 drag performances (because that’s how my life is), so I did not get the target 1,667 words per day required to maintain the ideal trend. I FELL BELOW THE LINE!

Whew! Okay, but, you know, I could deal with it. I just had to write a little bit more than 1,667 words each day and I would catch up.

So one night I was up writing. And I was writing up a storm. The genius was just flowing like magic through my fingers. I knew that was the night I would write all the words and get caught up with the beautiful, perfect, glorious trend line. So I wrote and wrote until it was well past my bedtime and, unbeknownst to me, started writing while half asleep.

And my sleep writing makes literally no sense.

For context, my novel is a sci-fi novel that takes place on Mars and has absolutely nothing to do with witches or maps. But, somehow, in my half asleep state, I wrote the following in my Google Doc (I highlighted the nonsensical, sleepy part just in case it didn’t stand out).

Like…. what?

There is a part of me that feels like the lesson to draw is “don’t write when you are sick, exhausted, and delirious.”

And yet… maybe the better novel was the one about the witches with willing people to jump in their straw. Maybe next year I will find a way to write my entire novel in this half awake/half asleep fugue state. And maybe that will yield the best result.

I don’t know for sure.

One thing I do know for sure is that when I woke up and realized I had written complete gibberish, I did not go back and erase it because I needed the words if I ever wanted to reach 50,000. You may think that this means I am dishonest in saying I wrote a 50,000 word novel in a month when I damn well know that at least part of it is complete nonsense.

But you know what they say in NaNoWriMo: There are no cheaters, only rebels.