Rethinking NaNoWriMo

I participated in NaNoWriMo—that crazy, madcap month when anyone can become a novelist—for nine years running. Starting when my son was nine months old, corralled in a playpen beside the laptop, and continuing until he was in the third grade, I set aside every November to write a novel. I wrote through everything. I wrote while packing to move to Seattle. I wrote while temporarily living in a business hotel in Cincinnati. I wrote while recovering from swine flu-induced pneumonia. Last year, in what would have been my tenth anniversary with NaNoWriMo, I stopped.

I had a good reason, though I didn’t write about it at the time. My mom had breast cancer and her surgery was at the beginning of November. I couldn’t, I decided, do everything. It was a relief. After nine years of trying every which way to write a novel in a month, it felt amazing to actually live through a November, to experience it like a normal person. Well, like a normal person helping her mother recover from a mastectomy, but a normal person, nonetheless.

As November approached this year, I thought a lot about writing my tenth novel. I love NaNoWriMo. I love being part of an event where writing takes first priority. Writing is glamorous during NaNoWriMo. It’s social. It’s trendy. It’s a lot of things that writing usually isn’t at all. NaNoWriMo is compelling. It’s also transient. It involves a lot of writing just to write and a lot of words that go on the page for the sole purpose of being words on the page. After 450,000 of those words, I think it’s time for me to move on.

This November, I’ll be writing. Oh yes, I’ll be writing, but I’ll be writing at my own pace. I’ll be writing daily, but maybe not 1667 words a day. I’ll be living this writer’s life and feeding off all that novel-writing energy in the air, but I’ll also be living November.

I’ve missed November. It’s good to see it again.