#NaNoWriMo 2021: You're Halfway There
Fifteen days into National Novel Writing Month, and some of them may have been less than perfect. It’s not a problem.
We’ve hit the halfway mark of National Novel Writing Month; by now, you’ve probably experienced at least one frustrating day. That’s normal—and I wanted to draw upon some advice I shared during a previous #NaNoWriMo cycle to encourage you not only to accept those “bad” days, but to embrace them.
Whenever you “mess up,” whenever you have a less than perfect writing day, it’s because you were taking a risk. Whatever you were working on, even if you’ve been writing for years, even if you’ve been writing similar stories for years, you were venturing into new territory—why wouldn’t you expect to make a misstep or two along the way?
The good news is that you can set any “mistake” aside and return to the challenge you’ve set for yourself. Every “mistake” you make along the way, every attempt to tell a story that doesn’t come out quite right, is evidence of your effort, and though those attempts may not map out a perfectly straight line to a finished manuscript, they will set you, generally speaking, in the right direction, as long as you keep trying.
If you’ve been writing for any significant amount of time, you’ve probably felt like you’ve screwed up on more than one occasion. Maybe it’s something you were able to fix right away. Maybe you had to think about it overnight before you came up with a better way to express what you were trying to say. Maybe it’s something that happened in the last few days, and you’re still trying to figure out how to get it right before Thanksgiving comes along and totally derails your writing routine.
Whatever the circumstances are, you’re okay. You know more about your story, and about yourself, than you did when you started writing. You can build upon that knowledge and continue to move forward—and, over time, you will become more fluent in the language of your stories.
That fluency is, I think, the ultimate goal of NaNoWriMo, for those who take part. Don’t get me wrong: If you have a coherent, finished manuscript on November 30, that’s awesome. If it’s within striking distance of publishability, that’s amazingly awesome. But everyone who started writing on November 1 and is still writing on November 30, even if they missed some days in between, has proven to themselves that they don’t just want to write, they can commit to writing, and can reap the benefits of that commitment.
So don’t worry about getting everything perfect in your next writing session. Just write, and see where it leads you.