How I wrote a novel in 30 days — and seven years

Sometimes you need a writing sprint to get your words out. Sometimes you need a wander.

I’m launching a new feature for paid Damptown Almanac subscribers only: An audio version of each week’s post, read by me. My goal is to keep all content open to all of my readers, while thanking paid subscribers for helping me do the work I do.

If you’re a paid subscriber, access the audio version at the bottom of this post. If you’d like audio posts for accessibility reasons but cannot pay to subscribe, message me and I’ll hook you up.

It’s that time of year when I don’t have to search the wind for its chill, when pumpkins rot on porches, gutted and gaping, when social media and anti-social media conspire to convince me my value as a person rests on my ability to accumulate and arrange cheap winter ephemera despite it being very much fall.

It’s here. It’s finally, finally here.

Ever since November of 2016 when I had three tiny kids and a big, impossible dream, I’ve spent the best month of all in a half-stupor, half-frenzy of words and story.

But I’m doing things a little differently this year.

For those not in the know, every November there’s a month-long writing sprint called National Novel Writing Month — NaNoWriMo. Anyone can play, and it’s free. If you manage to get down about 1,670 words a day, at the end of the month you’ll “win” NaNoWriMo with 50,000 words written, a rough draft for a (very short but technically) novel.

Shout out to everyone doing NaNo this year — and an even bigger shout out to those of you who can’t make it work.

November writing is still for us.

NaNoWriMo changed my life in 2016. By which I mean it made me a novelist.

In 2016 I set the goal of writing as much as I could. I would have been ecstatic with 10,000 words. I shocked myself when I hit 50k.

With three preschool aged kids in peak flu season, I didn’t get those words in 1,600-a-day doses, but in rare heaps of 10k. Most days I wrote 200 words, but on three Saturdays I wrote until I was blurry-eyed and loopy. I took the train to Portland and I didn’t look up from my laptop for the entire 4-hour trip. I did the same thing 12 hours later.

We all have moments in our lives that make us just a little bit in love with ourselves. My hands kneading the keyboard in that otherwise horseshit November was definitely my meet-cute. (Do you remember November of 2016? God, what a nightmare.)

It’s understandable that I valorized that time. My origin story was a damn good one, and I was proud of it. I am proud of it.

But I tell it a little differently these days.

For years I told people — especially myself — that NaNoWriMo was the thing that helped me get my book out.

Seven years later, I don’t love myself any less for that month of sheer grit and storytelling.

But I’ve sat with this story long enough to know it wouldn’t have left me alone no matter how I wrote it. No matter how fast I got that rough draft out, I would have kept going, regardless of how much editing I did along the way.

That 30-day sprint wasn’t about the pages I accumulated, or even about telling myself I could in fact accumulate pages.

The real magic of NaNoWriMo wasn’t that it helped me force my story out.

It was that it forced me to admit I wanted to write a book in the first place.

I’ve been a writer my entire life, so it may seem obvious to some people that I’d end up with a book.

And yeah, I probably did know that about myself when I was nine and I’d written about a zillion stories and I never thought about what to do with them and I stayed up late every night just to keep reading, keep reading, keep reading.

Books were my first love and they’ll be my last love.

Writing is more like the wild crush that tortures me. It drives me to madness, but I’ll never let it go.

Sometimes writing is a free flow of ideas gushing from you. Sometimes writing is the thing with cement galoshes.

I’ve written before about the animal in the room with me when I do my best work.

It’s here with me now, taking this piece in an entirely different direction than I planned to. I have no idea where I’m headed with this. I just know I can’t stop.

I spent a long time trying to tame the wildness of my creativity by repackaging it and selling it to myself as something else.

First I was going to be an academic writing important papers, and then a journalist speaking truth to power. I was going to be the kind of writer whose words served a deeper purpose and who never wrote for writing’s sake alone.

I was going to be a writer who could control my wildness.

I still am a newspaper reporter, and while I love the work I do, it’s not who I am.

When I write this newsletter and when I work on my novels is when I’m most myself.

It’s also when I struggle the most.

When I’m in a bad place with my writing, I’m in a bad place with everything. I’m not sure it’s altogether good for me. But I’ll never ever quit it forever.

It’s not really about finishing a book or publishing a book or 1,600 words in 30 days. It’s not about whether you’re a plotter or a pantser or how many drafts it takes for your story to glide.

It’s not about how you stop or when you stop or how long you stop. It’s not about how many books you put in the drawer or if you ever open the drawer and it’s not even about which book is finally the book that sings.

It’s about this moment. My computer in my lap and my hands pulsing.

It’s about the story I tell myself: I want this moment enough for nothing else to matter.

After writing and parenting and housework, I spend the largest share of my waking hours walking. I put on my shoes and I stumble out my front door whenever I can, sometimes lazily looping the block and sometimes wandering until I find a street I’ve never been on before, a tree I’ve never touched or a house I’ve never told a story about.

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

My job is just to decide to go on a walk, to put on my shoes and stumble out the door. Walks are best when I leave the rest to my wildness. When I let myself wander.

I wish I could go back to a time when I didn’t know my phone was tracking my steps. When I couldn’t pull up an app that supposedly gamifies my wandering by telling me how my steps compare with the day before and how this month holds up to last April.

That app knows nothing about the two-block stroll that saved me from yelling at my kids but did nothing for my calories burned. The app wouldn’t understand how cool it was to find the house belonging to the Mark Twain lookalike with the pink Converse and the lumbering dog, to find out he was an artist who painted the very street I was walking. The app can’t track the times I let my dog lead me or sat under a tree with my nine-year-old for an hour and just listened, then texted her dad to come pick us up.

Sometimes a walk is made better because I stopped walking, and the app doesn’t have any way of measuring that.

The walk was never about the steps in the same way the novel was never about the words.

You need the steps to get there. Sometimes it might motivate you to count them. But sometimes counting them robs you of all ability to wander, of the ability to fly.

I’ve been thinking about my plans for this November for a while. I had a plan all laid out, and I thought it was creative enough to attract my wildness while keeping me on track.

I was going to spend each day of November doing final revisions on a chapter. By the end of November, I’d finally be done with the book, and I could spend the dregs of the year querying it.

Now that I’m here, I don’t want to do that at all. I don’t want to count my chapters any more than I want to count my words. I don’t want to count at all. Not hours or chapters or days or minutes or words or years or plot holes. I don’t want to know how long it’s taking me or how long I have left.

I don’t want to know how long it took anyone else, either. I don’t care whether this was their first or tenth book. All I care about is the story.

I want to write, so I’m going to keep telling myself that.

For me, NaNoWriMo this year is about telling myself I I want to sit in the room with my wildness and see what happens next.

I’m going on a wander with it. My job is to put on my shoes and get out of my own way.

I hope you enjoy the audio version of this week’s post!