When I was eight years old, I sat down at my juvenile desk—glitter markers in hand—and began to pen the greatest novel known to well… me. It was called “Life” and it disclosed some of my secrets to longevity. They also may or may not have been complete with pictures. Look, I was eight.
When I was in middle school, my favorite projects were ones that involved creative writing and the opportunity to bind our stories, albeit with pipe cleaners and written on construction paper. In high school, I tried endlessly to write even three chapters of a story that I thought had a lick of potential to be published. I also spent a LOT of time looking up character names and deriving meanings for potential stories. Regardless, all of this anti-climatic novel writing still led me to end up being dubbed “Most Likely to Write a Best-Selling Novel” in my senior year (not daunting or anything).
Novels. We’ve all read at least one—I hope—but it is much less common to find those crazy enough to write them. November is heralded as National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short. The challenge is to write a 10,000 word novel in 30 days; you cannot start before November 1 and must end by November 30. The website allows writers to talk in forums, get feedback, and find a niche. It’s a community I yearn to fit into so badly and while I have attempted NaNoWriMo about four times, I always seem to fall off the writing wagon.
In this article, I think I want to tell you why this month is so special to me as well as my aspirations of successfully accepting the novelist challenge, whether it be in November or one of the other eleven months in the year.
First off, I love this platform of Her Campus so much; I love that it’s a digital portfolio, but I’ve always had the dream of walking into a Barnes and Noble to see my name on a book cover which so many of my favorite authors have seen before me. Electronics are definitely metamorphosing the way we consume media and literature, but I quite honestly hope the ink-on-paper path stays alive forever.
Now, while I have evolved from my initial attempts at novel writing, my high school efforts were still embarrassing. For example, I used to begin every attempt with my main character prepping to go to school: from the waking up, shower, dressing, breakfast, and dashing onto the bus. That was the only way I knew how to start a story because that’s the story I lived every day. Or there would be other times that I took creative liberties from certain genres; inevitably, I would end up drafting stories that were just slightly altered versions of some of my own favorite books. It’s proven to be a challenge consistent with my time spent as a writer.
And while college-aged me could further improve upon my high school novel writing tactics and techniques, I’m strapped for time to commit. I am a full-time college student, editor-in-chief of Her Campus, and I have an on-campus job. I also want time to just be a normal college kid and binge Netflix… But unless I’m writing a hard-hitting expose on the streaming service, I’d be lying to myself if I said time I haven’t spent in front of my keyboard was anything but a desperate attempt to stall. Because truth is, I’m terrified to begin the process in earnest. Writing and crafting stories is what I feel I was meant to do, but if I start to delve into a project and find myself creatively blocked, I don’t know what I’d do.
So instead of sitting through another glorious November without making headway on what could be a Nobel-Prize winning book, I am going to make a list of ten things I want to accomplish in the next 30 days, which hopefully will propel me into a writing frenzy.
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Sit down at the computer. Sometimes this can be the hardest part.
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Type the first ten plots that come to mind. No ideas are bad ideas.
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Cross out unviable ones. There will be some that are just painfully bad. But I won’t know that until I write or type them all.
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Choose one I want to run with—for now. There are so many routes to go with this, and I genuinely love this aspect.
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Begin my favorite part: names! Time to spend an excessive amount of time on babynames.com!
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Sit down at the computer—again. Recommitting to the idea can be difficult after the initial excitement wears off, but I am determined!
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Write titles. Write as many as I think I need. Revisit point #2 as a reminder.
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Begin to develop this story. Here I go, chapter one baby!
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Write as many chapters as I feel inspired to. Hannah: Do NOT fret if I can’t write a LOTR length story in one sitting… that would be unnatural.
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Stay positive about the process! Use November as a swift kick in the butt to begin chasing my dream, one chapter at a time.
Now, I know that this upcoming November will not be the month that I pen my best-selling novel. Nor do I know if next November will have a different fate, but to me, this month is about exploring different avenues of stories I feel that I could be passionate about!
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