I’m not going to ask you if you won NaNo. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. NaNoWriMo is a great event to help spur your creativity and offers community in order to encourage writers to get their words down. And as a professional writer, I know how hard the fight is to get new words on the page.
But NaNo isn’t simply a month-long writing party. It’s a way to change the mindset, for the better, of writers who struggle. All writers including those who write for a living and those who write as a hobby. It also helps those who scratch words in the dark to keep themselves sane.
What I love about NaNo is the preparatory work in October that helps me focus on a new story or a story I’m currently working on. I also love the camaraderie in sprint groups on Facebook and Discord servers. I have won NaNo in the past and there have been some years that I’ve been editing a book and I didn’t add a single word. Yet the word count doesn’t matter. The most important thing that NaNo does is that it validates the act of writing itself. NaNo reminds us that writers can change how people think about the world around them. NaNo reminds us that writers can change the world. But there’s a caveat–NaNo reminds us that writers can only do those things if they actually commit the words to paper.
As for my check-in, I wrote 20,000 words on a new manuscript and spent weeks revising a current manuscript. While I have no idea how many words I changed, cut, edited, and rewrote on that manuscript, I was able to solve a troubling logic issue with the plot. And in the long run, that’s more important than word count. So, I didn’t win NaNo. And that’s okay. Because I worked and wrote and edited. For the month of November, I reminded myself that my words count and the stories in my head will one day sit in the hands of readers. For the month of November, I reminded myself that writing is what I’m meant to do with my life. For the month of November, I reminded myself that, despite the difficulty in getting words down, I am not alone.
NaNoWriMo ends today but the act of writing down words continues because our words matter. Our words can affect lives. Our words can change the world.
