This year, I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or NaNo for short) because I finally had the time to dedicate a full month to writing. Now, the official NaNo page is no longer available because they did shitty business practices and went under, as they should. However, without an official site, how do you track your word count?
Well, I did it the same way I track most things: Using Google Sheets.
Each day, I would track how much I wrote during the day and for how long, which gave me good insight into how long it takes me to write 100-3000 words in a writing session. However, I didn’t just stick to working on my novel draft, as the name of the writing sprint suggests.
If I wrote the same thing every day, I would have gotten increasingly tired of what I was writing, and get incredibly burnt out. I know because I’ve done NaNo like that before, and I couldn’t manage it well. So, instead of working solely on a novel draft, and instead of aiming for 50k words, I gave myself the goal of 10k words and to write whatever I felt in the mood to write on that particular day.
So, depending on the day, I might’ve written a Substack post, worked on one of my novella drafts, continued drafting out the first draft of my novel, planned out my fanfiction projects, or cooked up an essay idea that I’ve been sitting on. Each of these were vastly different projects from the last, in an array of genres, which kept my writer’s block on its toes perpetually.
Did it work out? Did I write everyday? Did I successfully reach my goal? How much did I manage to write? Well, let’s see…
What I Worked On This Month
I had many draft ideas coming into the month of November, as I hadn’t really written much in the last few months at all.
Most of the time, I worked on my Substack posts. These are easy enough thought-exercises that stretch my brain in just the right way that kept me engaged in my work. As you’ll see below, the last month of Substack posts were all counted toward my word count goal, and even the upcoming month of Substack posts were drafted as well. I had a pretty steady plan of action for my upload schedule coming into the month. I was working weeks in advance, so when a post finally uploaded, I had been done writing it weeks ago, so it was kinda hard to keep track of what I had actually uploaded and what was still in the drafts (i.e. I’m starting this post on 11/12, the day my save scumming post went live, which I finished writing on 11/3. Crazy, right?)
Outside of that, I also had a couple of novella drafts I started working on and a novel draft that’s been in the works for so long, the folder of planning is starting to fall apart due to how many pages of paper are in it.
Novella draft one, for instance, is my work called “To the End.” It follows the story of a woman who realizes her life isn’t as she thought, and how she handles such a truth (think Trials of Apollo by Rick Riordan if it was speculative fiction). Novella draft two, on the other hand, is my work called “Undulating Waves,” which is a title that’s still in the works. It follows the life of a downtrodden woman in the 1900s and how she eventually cracks under the pressure of expectation. This is a character I created for a Call of Cthulhu TTRPG oneshot that I played with my friends, but I wrote such an extensive lore for her that it ended up birthing this entire novella.
The novel draft I worked on, which is entitled “FFW” on my tracking sheet, is a work I wrote for NaNo 2020, and have been trying to rewrite for genuinely five years. It’s called Fires From Within and it’s a fantasy story about a mercenary named Astra who learns her childhood best friend, Vivia, became the emperor and is starting a political campaign to take control of the entire continent. I have had so many alternating ideas of how I want this book to pan out, many times thinking that I could just write the story in one novel, but ultimately coming to terms with the fact that no, it’ll probably end up being a trilogy. If a war’s involved, it’s gonna take a couple of books to resolve it. Also, having read more fantasy/sci-fi war novels, I’ve realized what I enjoy in these stories and how to make it work, so hypothetically this draft should be the one.
And that’s about everything I wrote in the month!
The Ups
I decided to not focus on one work at a time, primarily because I knew that if I spent an entire month writing the same thing, I would get incredibly tired and/or stuck. So, luckily, I had this Substack to work on in between my creative fiction works, especially for days where I really didn’t feel like writing fiction. This ended up working phenomenally for me, as I always had something to work on, and always managed to write something in the day.
Out of all of the NaNos I’ve done this way, I ended up writing the most during this NaNo. Past NaNos, I could barely write everyday creatively, often barely hitting 500-1000 words in a day, and thus burnt out very quickly. This NaNo, I gave myself a lot of room to work on projects outside of fiction so I never ran out of things to write during the month.
This plan was working quite well for me for the first few weeks, but during the third week, I started losing steam drastically. To combat this, I shifted the focus on my second novella draft, “Undulating Waves,” panning the scene out from a specific moment in the character’s life to her entire life, and it ended up working phenomenally for motivation toward the final week.
Honestly, that final week working on “Undulating Waves” was some of the best writing sprints I’ve done in a while, including sprints during this month and previous sprints for this novella earlier in the month. Anneliese’s story is something that I’ve been envisioning for the last couple of months, and getting to write that story down was a breeze. I knew fundamentally what each plot point was going into it, how Anneliese interacted with the world and how the world formed around Anneliese, and what the ending was that it made a lot of the writing process much, much easier. Sure, some things were still a surprise while writing, but the writing process flowed much easier than my other drafts.
The Downs
As a chronic headache-haver, I often found that sitting at my laptop for hours on end did not help with headaches, so I had to take constant breaks. There were some days were I couldn’t write as much simply because I had a migraine, and couldn’t sit for that long to write. I lost a lot of motivation in the second week because I started the week with a migraine, and couldn’t work as much as I wanted to.
There were other days were I simply didn’t want to write for a full day, choosing to write in the morning, and work on some other project in the afternoon, or vice versa. I posted about this at one point, but I found that I rarely had time to study Japanese or coding, and it kind of sucked to not be able to do something else outside of writing. As someone who’s always had multiple hobbies, sticking to one hobby for a full month was a little draining. There were a couple of days in there were I wrote for like an hour, and decided to study instead.
Also, I’m learning that I really don’t like doing anything important on weekends, which is a fact of my life that I’d rather not change. It’s like my break days, where I actively use my brain during the week as much as possible, and then reward myself without conscious thought for two straight days. I did get some work done on these days, but not nearly as much as the week.
Toward the middle of the month, I started spending too much time focusing on how much time had passed and how little words I had written, and got frustrated with how little I was writing in the day. In the chart, you can see the decline in word count over time, but once I refocused my second novella draft, the line spikes back up. It’s honestly a very interesting case study in how my motivation shifts throughout a month.
The Overall Stats
For the month of November, I wrote 50,353 words, spending a total of 54 hours writing. Which, for anyone counting, is five times my original word count goal for the month. I told myself the goal was 10k because I didn’t think 50k was feasible, and I ended up hitting it anyway I would, in fact, say that this was a rounding success through and through.
This chart essentially showcases how many words I wrote on a given day. For the most part I wrote under 2k words a day up until the 21st, where I started spending more time writing “Undulating Waves.”
And this essentially is the proper breakdown of everything I wrote in a given day and for how long, just to showcase what writing everyday looks like; sometimes, even when you dedicate an entire month to writing, you can’t write everyday or your brain isn’t working in the way you want it to or sometimes you want to do literally anything other than writing, and that’s okay.
Plus, I think it’s kinda fun to see what Substack posts I was writing when, especially when you compare it to when they actually got uploaded. Like, damn! If you want to post weekly Substack posts, then you gotta write like two weeks in advance! Which, frankly, when you’re doing a month-long challenge like this, is incredibly annoying because this post has to go up at the end of the month and you have to write about things you haven’t fully experienced yet. I had to put my upload schedule in my calendar so I knew what posts went up when. It was a bit of a mess, but I got used to it!
Will I Continue Writing Everyday After November?
Honestly, no. It’s not an easy expectation to put on yourself and you end up in your head a lot about word count and goals and timeliness, and that’s just not the spirit of writing for me. It’s a fun challenge for sure, but quite stressful for something that’s mostly fun.
I do want to write more, and this did show me that I have a lot of time on my hands to write if I carved it out. But, I also really wanted to study coding and game design, and I didn’t have time to do that and write. Hell, a lot of my writing time ended up cutting into gaming time, so I almost didn’t play Metroid Prime 3 at all this past month (which is going to be so ass to get back to).
If I didn’t have any other hobbies that I wanted to fulfill, or if I didn’t have to take a break every hour because sitting that long hurts my head, I probably would spend all of my waking hours writing. However, I’m just not built like that.
I will continue trying to upload on here weekly—I should be able to post the next month of uploads weekly for sure. And, now, I’m close to wrapping up two novellas, so I can start spending more time editing those for publication. But, more than anything, I am so incredibly excited to be able to write and not have to count every single word I wrote in the day. I can’t wait to start drafting and editing things again, good lord.
And that’s it! Definitely an interesting month, to say the least. I feel like I simultaneously got a lot of work done and none whatsoever, which is an awesome feeling.
If I get the opportunity to do this again, I will probably try to spend more time drafting before the month starts, because I really didn’t prepare anything, and ended up running out of things to work on without having the time to draft anything new.
Did you do NaNo? What were your stats for the month? Lemme know what worked and what didn’t for writing every day in a month!
Next week, we’ll be getting into December properly, which means the end of the year is coming up quick. Gonna be interesting not feeling required to write everyday, but it might also be interesting to see what things from this month I end up bringing into the next.
And as always, see you next week!
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