Flashback to November 30, 2018. It’s 10 o’clock on a Friday night and I am sitting on the floor in the hallway, crying like I’ve just watched Titanic for the first time. Not because I’ve written close to 6,000 words in just a handful of hours. Not even because it’s the last day of National Novel Writing Month and for the first time in nine years, I am going to win it. It’s because I’ve just spent 50,000 words saying sorry, and saying goodbye.

FINAL WORD COUNT: 54,099.

I chose The Cat Lady (working title—can you believe I still don’t have a title yet?!) as my NaNoWriMo project for a few reasons. One, because it seemed to require less research than most of my other story ideas currently waiting to be developed. Two, because it has all the basic elements of a story I, as a reader, would gravitate to like a cat to catnip: magic, monsters, and feline friends. Mostly, though, I chose it because it chose me—because it hasn’t just been nine years since I was a NaNoWriMo participant. It’s been nine years since I said goodbye to my real-life feline familiar, and it still hurts. With that realization came another, that not everyone would understand that kind of connection, but that the right story might help them to do so, and that planted the seed of an idea that took root and would not let go.

So I wrote, without an outline, without much of a plan besides this: Write regularly. Write honestly. Write about the things you fear and the things you hope and the things that broke your heart. Get it all out in this draft, because this one is just for you.

What came out of it was incredibly personal, at times incredibly painful, but ultimately cathartic. And I learned a hell of a lot in the process.

NaNoWriMo 2018: Lessons Learned

1. I am 100% a planner, never a pantser. I thought, if I was going to do NaNo, I was going to go all the way and start with a completely blank page and zero notes. I haven’t done this since I was a kid; I always outline. And while it was kind of exciting not to really know where I was going with things, to watch developments happen “live” on the page, it’s not a method that works particularly well for how I think—or how I write.
2. I’m a speed demon when I don’t worry about the quality. I remember struggling so hard nine years ago when I last participated in NaNo. I never felt like I had enough time, and always felt like I was dragging my feet. Looking back, I can see now that I was still self-editing way too much for this kind of challenge. This year, I discovered that by leaving myself little revision reminders along the way as I drafted, I could bypass my own editing instincts and keep writing—making for a much more productive writing day in terms of word count. And for a first draft, getting words on the page is really the only thing that matters.
3. I still love writing. One of the pitfalls of being a writer/editor by day and by night is writing fatigue. Back in high school and college, I used to write every day, in between classes (and sometimes during them—sorry, professors) and after school, sometimes losing sleep and probably a little sanity just to finish a chapter or particularly poignant scene. Teenage me once spent two weeks straight writing a close-to-80-page Harry Potter fanfic during summer vacation. All of the stories I wrote back then were pure labors of love. They weren’t for profit or a paycheck; in fact, many never saw the light of day (and hopefully never will). But after writing for a living for the past several years, it can be all too easy to classify all writing as “work” and forget the joy of creating something new, the feeling that made me want to be a writer in the first place. Participating in NaNo this year helped me remember how to look forward to writing—to let go of doubt and self-criticism and just write a story because it feels better to put it all down on paper.
4. I do have time enough in the day. Despite often feeling otherwise, I found that knocking out 2,000 words on a weeknight wasn’t as hard or as time-consuming as I thought it would be if I broke it down into short “word sprints” of 30 minutes at a time. Staring at a blank page and thinking, I have to write a novel now, makes it all seem so impossible—like you have to move a mountain in a single night. But even just half an hour a day of writing usually yielded around 1,000 words—and that adds up faster than we realize when we first open up that fresh word doc. And if I have several hours to play The Witcher whenever I want, I can certainly spare at least 30 minutes to doing the thing I want, more than anything, to dedicate my life to doing—telling stories.
5. It’s OK to write utter crap. That first draft of The Cat Lady is basically a literary hairball. I was choking on emotions I’d been repressing for years, and finally I just hacked them all up on my keyboard in one big blob. It’s not a pretty thing. It’s messy and tangled-up and certainly not meant for public consumption. But “better out than in,” as they say. Writing that first, awful draft helped me deal with a few things—and leaves me free and clear-headed to do a much better job next time around, if I decide to come back for round two.

Looking Ahead

All in all, I’m grateful and so very glad I decided to take part in NaNoWriMo this year. It’s been one heck of an experience, both as a writer and as a girl who still misses her kitty after all this time. And yes, I cried, but I smiled a lot, too. I had way more fun than I expected to. And I expect, if all goes well, I may find myself trying my hand at it again in Novembers yet to come.

To my fellow NaNo participants, whether you won or not: I hope you learned things, that it showed you how much more capable you are than you may think, that you learned what you’ve been doing right (and what you can do better next time), and that it helped you grow. Most of all, I hope it reminded you why you wanted do this crazy writing thing in the first place.

And thank you, as always, to my readers, my friends, my family, and everyone who supported me this past month and beyond. Without you, those 54,000 words—and so many besides—might never have been written.