2021 November Challenge

How’d I do?

My instinct is to say that I failed miserably, but that’s not necessarily true. So: what’d I accomplish?

I wrote a total of, roughly, 6k words - and mostly in the first half of November. I was killing it at 1k-1.5k words per day, right up until I wasn’t. I set up a private space for myself with nothing but my iPad, a bluetooth keyboard, and Name of the Wind to interact with.

About a week in, I realized that the idea I was trying to work with was sorely under-developed, so I adjusted my goal: instead of 50k words of meandering, disconnected prose - what I’d been doing so far - I would aim to finish and refine an outline for the sprawling story in my head. Not too difficult; I managed a first, very abstract iteration, and I did make some headway in the development.

Until I sat down to write this, I actually hadn’t realized I’d met my second-iteration goal.

About halfway through the month, I shut everything down to make space on my device and in my life for focused working time; diddled with app and device settings, removed all stimulating imagery and desktop icons, broke my day up into predictable blocks of time, transitioned my outline effort into Photoshop, made rules for myself that basically translated to “no messaging applications open before 5pm” and so on. It’s been tremendously helpful going forward, but at the time: nnyeh.

Didn’t hit 50k, so it wasn’t a win, but it was a weirdly positive month for my life overall, and I did kickstart a writing effort I’ve continued throughout the months since.

Why’d it go like that?

Mitigating Factors

Although I’m more than willing to take full responsibility for my failure to achieve the original goal, in hindsight it was pretty optimistic. November was my second full month as a co-caretaker, so I was still settling in to the house, figuring out the caretaking routines, and acclimating to life adjacent to dementia.

Also little past the halfway point, I got mad side-tracked by family drama into writing an 80-page report to file for Borrower Defense to Repayment - coming in at about 30k words that didn’t count at all toward NaNo. Sadness. Even sadder? I had to file by mail, and my printer ran out of black ink, so the first 8 pages are magenta… oh, and they seem to have lost track of my case. Shoot.

NaNo’s Structure: Actually Harder than Inktober

While this feels like it should be obvious, given the pass-fail rate of both challenges, it took me a minute to figure out why.

Goals and Constraints - Inktober: - Execute on specific, randomized variations of one type of task every day for 31 days. - NaNoWriMo: - By the end of a 30-day period, start a new novel and achieve a word count of 50,000 (or more).

Inktober is a challenge with a lot of restrictions; inking is a specific subset of art skills, your prompt is selected by an outside party, and every day has what feels like a unique, specific win condition. Within those constraints, you’re free to interpret the prompts however you like, and as long as the art is inked, basically anything goes. The purpose of the challenge is skill- and habit-building, which is not quite the same as NaNo, but it’s also not too far off (seeing as you need to write a lot to end up with a novel).

NaNoWriMo technically has two restrictions, but they’re a bit more loose: the thing you’re writing should be a novel, and it should be new. The 30-day bounding box is sort of a constraint on the 50k word count, but only in the sense that a due date is a constraint on an essay: you fail if you don’t turn it in on time, but it’s got nothing to do with how the essay is graded. The word count, itself, is not actually a constraint; figures online vary, but the range for a “completed novel” (which is really the end goal, here, isn’t it?) is something like 50-150k words, with 50k often falling short of the low end or pointed to as the bare minimum, with anything 49,999 and under technically counting as a novella or, at the lower end, a short story. Assuming you want to write a new novel, NaNoWriMo gives you ultimate freedom and a due date.

I’m inclined to believe that the presence of concrete goals and constraints are the crux of the success discrepancy. They reduce mental overhead and ambiguity, and bring the focus during execution down to a scale that’s much easier for a regular human brain to work with. The end of the day usually feels more real than the end of the month, and we seem to experience greater success making assessments and predictions and adapting on the fly on the today-scale than the three-weeks-from-now scale. Perhaps I’m the only deficient banana of the bunch, but I find that I lose a lot more time to uncertainty and indecision during blank-page, blue-sky exercises.

Take-aways

First:

In hindsight, I’m not mad about the stuff I did instead of NaNo, but I definitely did stuff instead of NaNo.

Second:

I might try NaNo again next year, but I’m interested in seeing if I can’t homebrew a structure to overlay and increase my likelihood of success. I think the Snowflake Method is cute, so that’s the sort of plan I have an eye toward at the time of writing. I’ll give this some more dedicated thought closer to the next November.

Caveat:

There are plenty of people out there who can totally just sit down and blast through 50k words of a new novel in 30 days, no muss, no fuss, no sweat. For funsies, I did the math to see how long it would take to complete NaNo if all I had to do was type the 50k words - at 115wpm, if I’m mathing right, that’d amount to 7.25 hours of typing. Maybe the project I tried to tackle was too big, maybe I’m too worried about the quality for a first draft, maybe, maybe. At the moment, I don’t think the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants (AKA pantsing) life suits my personal writing needs.