Nanowrimo 2022: A Retrospective

On November 1, 2022, I attempted Nanowrimo for the third time. (Technically, it’s the fourth, but there’s one attempt I don’t personally consider an attempt as I didn’t really try at all.)

This year, I relied on joining a Discord server, doing sprints, and—my biggest motivator—trying to score all the writing badges on the website. (I just about made it all except for the 1,667 words per day badge. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit upset about that, but…)

I won!

For the first time, I’ve won this challenge by writing 50k words, and also managed to write every day for 30 days until it became a ritual, almost.

Here are some things I have learned about myself during the process:

1. I can actually??? keep a habit consistent??? It turns out, the right motivators and environment helps cultivate an inner accountability; an urgency. My motivators this time around was mostly hinged around trying to score all the writing badges, which required me to update every day, as well as write at least par (1,667 words per day). This was combined with having to update my word count in my Discord status, hopping on for a few sprints in the writing server, and a promise to myself that I would allocate a part of my savings towards a savings goal if I wrote every day.
2. If I didn’t have an outline or ideas for scenes, I would have ran out of words to write. I stumbled upon this road block around the third week of the challenge. I am now fully convinced I don’t have what it takes to be a “pantser”: in order to make the 50k this year, I had to write scenes and character interactions I thought up for Book 2 and 3, jumping back and forth in the timeline just to fill out what came easily to me, then filling the middle. It made my manuscript riddled with holes, sure, but this was the only way to make the challenge work for me.
3. Time pressure helps crank out words. And here I don’t mean timed sprints, which, of course, did help. Instead, what allowed me to spill out words on paper was setting my daily writing habit to be at 9PM. Because I often have work the next day, I couldn’t afford to sleep late, which meant I had to reach my 1,667 word count goal before 12AM latest. It fit well into my schedule as the last thing I did (barring my daily journaling habit) each day.
4. It’s a writing challenge for a reason, and not all books should use Nanowrimo as a starting point. Nanowrimo is fantastic for building up a habit, for writing (you can’t edit a book you haven’t written!), and for joining a global challenge with a community to enact a sense of external accountability. But it’s not for everyone, or for every story. Writing 1,667k words per day worked well for me, but not everyone has the luxury of a spare 2 hours per day to do nothing but write, or the capability to write for extended periods of time. Another discovery I made was that while I was writing, I began to repeat a lot of descriptors, was less intentional in the words I chose and its intended effect or purpose in the story, and some of my character’s dialogue became out of character (OOC) because I couldn’t take my time to stop and think. There’s pros and cons from both sides: whether it’s more important to have a lot of words but of lower quality, versus less words but higher quality, is purely a personal choice I believe one should make for each story. I’ve also read a few op-eds on this and I agree that while community is helpful for motivation, for sharing ideas, and for adding a layer of accountability, at the end of the day, writing is a solo endeavour.

Coming away from this experience, I do want to attempt it again next year. I’ve barely scraped the surface of my plans for Meet Me in the Hollows, and believe that this series is a good one for me to tackle using Nanowrimo as the tool to do it. However, based on what I have learned, I don’t think I’ll use Nanowrimo for writing any pieces I really care about—ones that require a careful hand, of intention behind what I put onto the page.

If you joined Nanowrimo this year, what were your takeaways? Were you able to hit your goals?