How participating in writing challenges shaped me #writing

From 2010 to 2023, I participated in an annual writing rumble called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It was an annual creative writing challenge held in November each year. It began in 1999 in San Francisco with a group of twenty-one writers challenging each other to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. Over the years, it grew into a multinational event, an annual convergence of writers from all over the world.

For the first eight years of my participation, it was fun. During my ten years as a municipal liaison (ML) for that now-defunct organization, I discovered that there is no one way to begin and complete a novel or any other writing project that fits everyone.

However, some of us get more done when we have a deadline, even a self-imposed one.

The joy went out of NaNoWriMo once the national leadership changed, for reasons well documented on YouTube. Both my Co-ML and I became disgusted with its overtly corporate direction and walked away a year before the organization fell apart.

But November happens every year, and it’s still a great month to get that novel out of your head and onto paper.

I got involved in that annual challenge when a young writer in the Philippines, whom I met through a gaming website, mentioned he planned to participate. I had never heard of it, but since I had started and sort of completed several rambling, incoherent novels, I was intrigued.

I wasn’t sure I could do this crazy thing. But when I broke down the numbers, I saw that all I had to do was write 1,667 words daily. That was something I could do if I dedicated three hours an evening to it. I told my husband, and he said to go for it, even though I didn’t know what to write about.

Everyone who knows me will tell you that fear of failure has never stopped me from ruining my life. So, I googled the national website and signed up. I chose the handle dragon_fangirl. Through the website, I discovered that my town had a large group of participants in various stages of their careers, some who’d never written a thing, and others with several books published.

I started going to their “write-ins,” meetings at coffee shops and libraries where we got together and wrote furiously for one or two hours as a group. We commiserated and discussed our progress, and in the process I found a cadre of friends who became the core of my writing group. I am still writing with them.

During that first year, I rose at 6:30 a.m. on November 1, 2010, filled with trepidation. I opened a new document, gave it the title of “NaNoWriMo novel,” and saved it,

Then I stared at my laptop, with no idea where to begin or even what I wanted to write.

I had been working on an urban fantasy for several years, but I wanted to do something new. An idea had been lurking in the back of my mind for a Don Quixote-style character. But I also wanted to write sword-and-sorcery.

I read Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote as a teenager (at my father’s behest) and borrowed (stole) the heartily misogynistic adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from Dad’s nightstand, along with any other lurid and unsuitable novels that happened to be lying around.

I loved any kind of fantasy, from sword and sorcery to Arthurian mashups to epic high fantasy. The first words I wrote for that year’s novel were: There was a cabin in the woods.

It was a banal beginning, but it gave my idea a jumping-off point. I just began telling the story as it fell out of my mind. Surprisingly, I discovered my word count averaged 2,500 to 3,000 words daily. By day fifteen, I knew I would have no trouble getting to 50,000, and by November 21^st, I had passed the 50,000-word mark.

At the 68,000-word point, I had completed my rollicking tale of snark and medieval derring-do. It was utterly unpublishable, but I didn’t know that until after an unfortunate experience with a predatory publisher.

The one thought that comforted me during that rough beginning was the fact that I had written the basics of a story I would have sought out at the bookstore.

After that fiasco, I turned to other writing projects for several years. I had written the storyline for an anime-based RPG that was never published because of a lack of funding and the tech crash. I still had the rights to my story and maps, so I wrote it as a novel, had it edited by my current editor, and published it. Three more novels set in that world followed.

Then my friends suggested I could rewrite the novel that my first publisher had ruined and republish it. After my wounds had healed from the bad publishing experience, I took the novel apart and separated the three main character threads. Over the next ten years, those threads became three books: Huw the Bard, Billy Ninefingers, and Julian Lackland.

All three novels are set in that original alternate medieval world, and center around the same group of characters. Much of what was originally written could be reused.

I learned how to lay down a first draft through participating in my local NaNoWriMo group. The wonderful people I met during those years helped me gain the tools I needed to turn a first draft into a properly finished book.

If you have the idea for a novel and want to get it out of your head while you are enthused about it, I suggest you write at least 1,670 words every day. At the end of thirty days, you will have written slightly more than 50,000 words.

This takes me about 2 hours of stream-of-consciousness writing, as long as I don’t go back to correct misspelled words. I do have an outline to follow, which has grown into a storyboard. This plan of action helps me know what should come next.