How I Accidentally Wrote a Book in a Month

2020 has been a difficult year for everyone, there’s no doubt about that. It feels as if the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified all the bad things that would’ve happened regardless and made it all feel ten times worse. I went through my fair share of traumatic events, and every time I thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. By the end of October, I was a pot boiling over with emotions I couldn’t unpack, and I knew I needed to do something with them before I exploded into a monumentally embarrassing breakdown. Talking to people is hard, and trying to get an appointment with my therapist is like trying to get Lorde to release her third album, so I did the only thing I could — I opened a Google Doc and wrote a single sentence.

The sentence sat abandoned for a few days, and then slowly, I began to add more. It wasn’t something I intended on becoming a big project; I just liked having something I could write whenever I didn’t know what to do with my hands. These unplanned writing sessions eventually became longer and longer, and soon I had the Google Docs app open on my phone all day, always ready for me to dive in and frantically type out a few sentences before returning to whatever I was doing. It felt like the first time I’d genuinely enjoyed writing in a long time. There was no pressure, no deadlines. I didn’t even have a solid plan for the plot. I was just writing how I felt — something I’d struggled to let myself do before.

I was still on the second or third chapter of this project when November began. If you’re a writer, you know exactly what November means — the fabled, historic and occasionally dreaded NaNoWriMo. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s an event where you’re tasked to write 50,000 words of a brand new novel during the month of November. I’ve been attempting NaNoWriMo since I was in 7th grade, and it basically went the same for me every year. I would write ridiculously strong the first week and then the momentum would immediately die, and by the end of the month, I’d be left with the same sad 5,000 words I started with. Despite the constant trial and error, it’s never really bothered me that I’ve never been able to win NaNo. I’m a slow writer, a reluctant perfectionist who still doesn’t understand that first drafts are supposed to be rough, and I’m okay with that.

I told myself I wasn’t going to technically do NaNo, because putting the label on my project was just going to stress me out and make it not fun anymore, but in the back of my mind, I thought it would be really cool to aim for 50,000 words. It would be fine if I didn’t, of course, but I started seriously thinking about what I would do if this project actually became something.

I didn’t have very long to go back and forth about that, because on November 15th I hit 30,000 words, and I realized that at the pace I was going, I very well could hit 50,000 by the end of the month. So I did. I wrote and I wrote and I poured every single part of my soul into that Google Doc until I hit 50,000 words on November 21st. It felt like a double achievement — finally, I had won something I had attempted every year since I was 12, and I’d also found a productive, healthy outlet for all my emotions about the things that had happened to me this year. I hadn’t even been trying to achieve any of that, yet here I was, having a silent little celebration all on my own.

I fully finished my book on November 24th. I had intended to let us have some space from each other before going into a second draft, but I couldn’t stay away for too long. I’d grown so used to always having it around that I couldn’t just let it go so easily. The comforting feeling of knowing I have somewhere safe to store all my emotions has only gotten stronger since I started the second draft. Having this project with me makes me feel a little bit better about everything I went through this year, because at least I got a new book and a newfound sense of achievement out of it.

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