NaNo Nostalgia

To me, every NaNoWriMo to me is distinct. Yet, it surprised me when, this year, NaNoWriMo said I’ve participated seven times since 2006, and I’ve only failed twice.

So, since I’m going this blog, I’m going to get a little nostalgic and talk about what it was like for each story and each year.

Artemis (2006)

I was in high school. I had been a part of a writing club called Writer’s Block, led by a very hyper pair of girls. We would discuss writing techniques, story building, even a little work-shopping. And they brought up NaNoWriMo to me for the first time. Now the very long journey of me aspiring to write a novel cannot be said here. Look to my rather long-winded introduction in the above tabs for that story. But I wanted to give it a try. So I wrote Artemis. A re-imagining of Greek/Roman mythology.

Now I didn’t have a laptop or a computer to myself, so Artemis is spread across at least two computers, one at home and one in the library at school, and two handwritten journals. And, because of the times, I might have actually kept a copy of it on a floppy disk. I wrote before school, during lunch, during class (if I could manage), and when I was home. And it was sheer pain to get the words out. I had written maybe a 10k novel attempt before then. But not even my short stories broke much beyond 5k. To say the least, I fell behind fast. And it seemed no matter how much I wrote, there were no words. I started second guessing my plot, I fretted that everything was moving too fast, that I would run out things to say before 50k.

I stopped at around 26k. Now, I think that it was probably a huge accomplishment, to get halfway through a novel, but at the time I was pretty devastated. I was terrified that I would never write anything of real length. A novel to me seemed like an impossibly long project that only the truly gifted could write. As if, no matter how hard I tried, I would never get to 50k or 70k or 100k.

Now, that idea is silly to me. I’ve reached all those word counts, I’ve seen so many other people reach those word counts. And, really, anyone can do it, no matter their skill. It’s just dedication, like sewing a quilt, learning to ride a bike, or playing a video game. Of course it seemed impossible at first. You’ve never done it before, so how could you know the feeling of success?

But every time I write, without fail, I’ll get those same thoughts of ‘its not going to be long enough’’ my characters are moving along enough’ ‘it’s just not enough’. And you know what I say? As long as you finish, it is enough. It doesn’t matter if its 20k or 200k. Whatever you write it is enough and it was worth every second, every tear, every word.

I’ve never gone back to Artemis, though I’ve certainly thought about it. I’ve even come up with plans for a sequel. But I think if I ever go back to it, I would undoubtedly pull up at the old document where I compiled it and start building from there.