Stephen Blackmoore

November’s coming up and you know what that means. Hungover frat boys recovering from Oktoberfest celebrations insisting that they can’t find their lederhosen because they scored with a hot hausfrau, not because they were butt-chugging shots of Jaeger.

LIARS.

Anyway, it’s also the month of NANOWRIMO, National Novel Writing Month, and a whole fuckton of you crazy bastards are going to try to squeeze out 50,000 words in 30 days.

That’s 1667 words a day. That’s missed meals. That’s pissed off spouses. That’s lost lunch hours. That’s people looking at you like you’re crazy when you tell them what you’re doing. That’s staring into your monitor late at night desperately trying to get ONE MORE FUCKING SENTENCE.

And just wait until Thanksgiving.

It’s not easy. It’s not simple. It might look like it, but believe me it’s not. You’ll find yourself obsessing over wordcount, plot, character, style. You’ll be freaking out about your deadline, hating yourself when you miss a day’s wordcount, loath the inexorable push of the calendar.

What the fuck are you thinking?

If that didn’t scare you off, congratulations. For good or ill you are my people.

Now embrace the crazy.

First, ask yourself what you’re hoping to get out of it. What’s your goal here? To be able to say you did it? To challenge yourself? As a bet? Because it seemed like a good idea at the time? All valid reasons. Knowing what you’re hoping to accomplish with this little exercise can go a long way to cut down on some stress.

When I did it back in… 2002. Jesus. That long ago? Anyway, back when I did it I had one goal and that was to see if I could sit my ass down and do the work. I had never written anything longer than maybe 4K. It was not about quality and I knew it. It was all about seeing if I could do the work.

And on stress, don’t take it too seriously. You’re trying to cram 50K words into 30 days. You are not writing a masterpiece. If you happen to come out the other end with one, fantastic, but don’t assume you will and, this is the important thing, be okay with that.

It’s okay to stress a little. That’s normal. You’re stretching yourself. Even if you’ve done it before it’s a stretch. But be careful not to beat yourself up too much if you miss your goal.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. If you can belt out 6K a day and come out of it without carpal tunnel or believing that the imaginary people in your head are going to kill you for what you did to them in chapter 8, more power to you. Remember, Thanksgiving is at the end of the month and I guarantee at least half of you are going to hit that weekend, realize you’re really behind and lose your shit.

Don’t do that.  Try to get some buffer built in at the beginning of the month.  It’ll make your family gatherings a little less twitchy.

And last, this isn’t a competition. The only person you’re up against is yourself. Winning here is a binary. You either did it or you didn’t.

Good luck, folks. I’ll be talking about outlines later this week. Not that you need one, but it never hurts to have a plan.