How Nanowrimo Saved My Writing Life

Nanowrimo: Day 14
Current Word Count: 22,052

Words to Go: 27,948

Average Daily Word Required to Meet Goal: 1644

If you have an MFA in Creative Writing, you do this, too: you not only use your MFA to get a job, but you use it in silly phrases. I’ve heard other MFA-ers say, “I have a Master’s Degree: I can put together this silly little cabinet from IKEA.” And, yes, we realize that because we read books and wrote scenes for two years doesn’t mean we know how to assemble furniture. Especially IKEA furniture.

But our degree has done something else to us that is counter-intuitive: writer's block. This isn’t true for everyone, but it’s at least true for me and a few of my classmates. Can you blame us? For two years, we had to write tens of thousands of words amid reading a new masterpiece novel every week, writing a 1000-word annotation on that novel the moment we finished it, and some semesters writing long critical essays on top of that. Oh, did I mention that we had to fit in our jobs and lives, too?

Natalie Goldberg is one of many writers that encourage fellow wordsmiths to just write. Just do it. Just put the frickin pen on the paper and see what happens. Don’t judge yourself. Don’t stop to edit. Just go. Put your inner critic in a box and don’t let her out until later. She doesn’t get a voice here.

Most writers struggle with putting the inner critic in a box, and I struggled with it before the MFA. You know what that means? After the MFA, I was screwed. Now I knew what fiction should do. Now I knew what a driving question was and how it relates to tension, conflict, and climax. Now I knew that setting should reflect your character. Now I knew that my scenes weren't measuring up as I wrote them.

Wait a second –I paid to have writer’s block?

Icess, you gave me reality. At the G4 panel “Prepping for Your Last Semester,” you said that you couldn’t write for at least six months after your were finished with your thesis, and that was okay because you needed a break. Thanks for these words of wisdom, because I felt like some writerly part of my brain broke.

I couldn’t write novels. Poems were my go-to genre, but because they were short. I tried creative nonfiction essays, writing down my adventures in the desert, or local historical curiosities. Yeah, those were bad. I attempted short stories again in the dead of winter, and these stories likewise seemed frozen.

Enter freak-out. What would happen if I was the writer who just said I was the writer? What if I turned into that lady at the coffee shop with a copy of Melville who is always so fashionably dressed and who is so eager to talk to passersby because it might mean I would procrastinate from writing? Yikes. No writer wants to be that “writer.”

And, yes, procrastination was a problem –something I still struggle with. (Yeah, I may or may not have wasted half an hour looking for that IKEA meme.)

But then something happened. You know, this little thing called Nanowrimo. (If you don’t know what it is, check out my past blog about Nanowrimo here.) Remember how I told you that it would actually get you working?

True.

Nanowrimo has saved my writing life. I know it sounds dramatic, but after two years of stress-writing for school and then almost a year and a half of building my way up to writing novels again, I needed a push. I needed some kind of motivator that got me to write something on the page that wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever written. My students are crazy sick of my repetitious adage, “Give yourself permission to write a crappy first draft.” They’re sick of it. I’m sick of saying it, really, but repeat it because they need to hear it. Maybe what made me the most sick of saying it was the hypocrisy of not actually doing it. I mean, here I am saying, “Give yourself permission to write a crappy first draft,” and yet I’m the last person to do it. Doesn’t that sound like a problem?

Problem solved. It’s called Nanowrimo. I can’t say this enough, my friends: Nanowrimo gets you to write something –anything- for 1667 words a day. I try to overshoot and write 2000 words a day, which (depending on the scene) only takes me 30-60 minutes to complete.

Can’t do it because you’re too busy? You really can’t take 30-60 minutes out of your day for yourself?

Do it. You’re doing your writing life a favor.