I’m not going to ask you if you hit your Rough Draft November goals because it doesn’t matter. Rough Draft November, like its predecessor NaNoWriMo, is a great event to help spur your creativity and offers community in order to encourage writers to get their words down. It’s also a great way to build a writing habit alongside your peers. As a professional writer, I know how hard the fight is to get new words on the page.
But Rough Draft November isn’t simply a month-long writing party. It’s a way to change the mindset, for the better, of writers who struggle, including all writers 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 this event 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 hit my goals 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 this event does is validate the act of writing itself. Rough Draft November reminds us that writers can change how people think about the world around them. It reminds us that writers can change the world. But there’s a caveat–Rough Draft November reminds us that writers can only do those things if they actually commit the words to paper.
As for my check-in, I wrote a 22,000 word novella, twelve blog posts, and added words to my WIP, my next Deadly Force novel A Promise at Midnight. I also had three different novellas in three different anthologies come out this month. While I have no idea how many words I changed, cut, edited, and rewrote on my WIP, I was able to move forward with my plot. And, to me, that’s more important than word count. 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.
Rough Draft November ends on Sunday, but the act of writing down words continues because our words matter. Our words can affect lives. Our words can change the world.
