The Value of NaNoWriMo

OK, I promise this will be my last accolade, or blowing my own horn for NaNoWriMo, but the value for NaNoWriMo (try typing that fifteen times!) is fantastic.

For me, it proved that I, (me, Daren, who ever since high school wanted to write, but was just too damn lazy and didn’t have the foggiest notion of where to start) could in fact write 50,000 words in a month. It also proved that I can actually write…”a little”. My grammar and punctuation sucked, and I am sure my eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Washburn, would’ve bled all over my manuscript if she read it, but who cares….that’s what editing is for; editing and rewriting is what I will be doing after the holidays.

The other valuable lesson of NaNoWriMo (still typing!) was a solid taste of what it’s like to be a writer. We all had a deadline to meet and we all had to sit down and “just do it”. A lot of my contemporaries chose to cram at the end and stay up late multiple nights, but I took the day by day approach. If you divide 50,000 by 30 you get 1666.6666666666666666666666666667. So, I wrote at least that many words each day of November. Sure, I missed a few days and there were other days I was so lost in my writing that I closed the entire world out and cranked out double and one day triple base word count. I think Teddy Roosevelt said “How do you eat an elephant?....Bite by bite.” That, my friends, is exactly what I did. Day by day writing. I loved it. There were days when I actually could just write all day – and did…I imagined I was Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, Dean Koontz, or any of the other thousand American writers.

Nano was fun and sort of a rite of passage for me. Completing it was a personal goal and I am extremely proud of myself for pulling it off. I look forward to participating in NaNoWriMo next year as well and am already excited about what my book will be about.