NaNoWriMo 2021 Results!
Did I finish my novel in just one month? NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is an annual challenge presented to writers. The rules are simple: write x number of words in one month. The standard is 50,000 words, which is the minimum length for a work to be considered a novel (while typically, a novel is actually 80,000-100,000 words in length). This challenge has been going on for several years. In fact, NaNoWriMo is how I wrote my novel How I Ruined My Life, which is about 70,000 words in length if I recall correctly. It was written, start to finish, in one month (well, the rough draft was). So, when November of 2021 came around, I decided to participate again, hoping to write as much as possible in the month of November. In this post, I’ll talk about my experience!
As with all of my blog posts, there is a video version of this post. If you want to check that out, you can do so here:
My Goal for 2021
The typical NaNoWriMo goal is 50,000 words. This is the standard, default setting for your goal when you set out to participate in NaNoWriMo. Just write 50,000 words in your novel. For me, I knew that this wasn’t going to be attainable with everything else I have going on. Between running a D&D campaign, changing to an overnight schedule for my full-time job, operating my new YouTube channel that features three videos each week, and all of the reading I had to do… November was going to be incredibly busy. 50,000 wasn’t a realistic goal, but I still wanted to challenge myself, so I set the goal post a little closer, at 30,000 words in my novel.
What I Wrote
For this year’s NaNoWriMo, I focused actively on my ongoing novel that is tentatively titled (or codenamed) Keeping Secrets from Friends. This is a contemporary YA coming-of-age novel similar to How I Ruined My Life, but with a greater focus on inner turmoil, friendships, and “hard things”, as opposed to addressing exclusively the challenge of just maturing as an individual. To be honest, I find works like this much easier to write than my fantasy or science-fiction pieces, so writing it is often more enjoyable and less mentally taxing than other projects. When I have time to sit down and write, I can churn out a few thousand words without breaking a sweat. The struggle, then, is actually finding time to write.
Each day that I had a writing session, I posted an excerpt of what I wrote on Instagram. This was part of the incentive to keep writing throughout the month of November… and I managed…
Twelve total days of writing my novel. That’s a bit less than half of November, which honestly is more frequent than I had originally expected to write my novel. However, even with writing so frequently, I only managed to put 23,900 words into my novel. It’s less than my goal of 30,000 but pretty darn close to it!
How Do I Feel About That?
So, I’m about 6,100 words shy of my personal NaNoWriMo goal of 30,000 words. I won’t lie: I’m disappointed by that, especially considering that I was so close and just one or two more days of cramming could have gotten me to the 30,000-word mark for the month, allowing me to meet my goal for this novel. However, I don’t feel too badly, because this isn’t because I didn’t spend time writing! In fact, writing other things is what pulled me away from my novel!
For D&D, I wrote over 10,000 words, this month. Then, for this blog and my YouTube channel, my word count was 15,000 words. I’m not sure how many words I wrote for my job, but with the documents I wrote and the emails I sent, it’s got to be several thousand, as well. So while I wasn’t writing my novel throughout November, I was writing, and I can’t feel badly about that!
Okay, I do wish I’d spent the time I wrote for my job writing my novel, but I’ve got bills to pay.
Anyway, while I failed to meet my 30,000 word NaNoWriMo goal for 2021, I did hit about 60,000 words written for the month of November in total, so hey… at least I’m still writing words, even if they aren’t all the words I’d prefer to be writing.
What’s Next?
All right, so what’s next for my novel? I’ve written about 24,000 words in it, this month, plus what little I had before, so what’s coming up next? Am I going to wait until next November to pick back up in writing it, or am I going to just keep on chugging along with the story? The answer is: a little of Column A and a little of Column B. Keeping Secrets from Friends is going to be a long project, especially because the current plan has four books in it. I’m going to keep writing when I get a chance, but I probably won’t make any significant progress until next November (unless a miracle happens and I retire from IT before then).
I hope to periodically provide updates regarding this story, too! I have them spaced out pretty significantly, so the next update for Keeping Secrets from Friends won’t be out until at least March of next year, so keep an eye out for that.
Conclusion
Fellow writers are my primary audience for this particular post, as I wanted to show that you shouldn’t feel too badly if you failed to meet your NaNoWriMo goal for 2021. There are plenty of other things that you may have been focused on, like experiencing other stories, be they games, movies, television shows, books… whatever the case may be, you may have been drawn to experiencing the stories created by others. Or, perhaps you’re like me and had several other writing projects!
Thanks for checking out this post. I hope you got something out of it! If you’d like to support me, the best way would be subscribing to my new YouTube channel. Additionally, you can follow me on social media! I’m TLBainter on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with the latter being where I’m most active. I’ll have those social links down in the description.
Next week is another period of reading and writing! I’ve got a continuation of my Homebrew Campaign Creation Series, my review for Pierce Brown’s Iron Gold will finally be out, and after that… I’ve got the first in a trilogy of videos I’m pretty excited about, so stay tuned! Until then… bye!