If only I’d made just five mistakes. To recap: #1 I Subbed Before I Was Ready, #2 I Gave My Work Away, #3 I Wrote The Book They Wanted
Acorns
I’ve been taking my sweet time to reveal my five mistakes. It was almost a year ago that I conceived of the series, but this kind of confessional is both good and bad for me: good because I store mistakes like a hibernating squirrel, bad because this kind of writing makes me feel like I’ve locked myself out of the house and realised I’m not wearing any clothes.
I want this series to be complete by the end of the year. I’m a big New Year New Me person — hell, I’m a big New Morning New Me person, New Coat New Me, New Brand of Herbal Tea New Me, I’m incorrigible. The list of five has sat with me for months and creatively it’s time to chop-chop. I can always jimmy a window and climb back in.
1667 Words a Day
I expect that everyone I’m writing to knows that NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. I didn’t until 2006; it began in 1999. Side note: lately, there have been distressing problems in the NaNoWriMo community, which I know very little about because I’ve never taken part in the forums. If you’re interested in that side of things, here’s one source of information about what’s been going on: NaNoWriMo Moderator Accused of Child Exploitation
For me, it’s simply been a case of: It’s November / I will write 1667 words a day / outside of my family, who will notice that the dinner and laundry provider is now wearing headphones a lot and pointing angrily at the toaster three times a day when they say they’re hungry, no one else will know that I’m doing it.
I’ve attempted NaNoWriMo three times. And I want to make it clear that I’m not writing this to discourage people from “write a novel quickly” challenges. I dislike the snobbery I witnessed in the early NaNoWriMo days, that “no one who is serious about novels would consider rushing them” attitude. The first time I did it, I really needed it.
In November 2006 I had a toddler, I was eight months pregnant, could hardly walk because of something called symphysis pubis dysfunction (fun to say after a couple of gins), and I’d been dumped by my literary agent. NaNoWriMo was my emotional comeback: you are not going to let that agent, this pregnancy, or being a full-time parent of two, stop you from writing.
My first time was a happy failure: 28,000 words in a month. A miracle. I stopped writing to give birth on our nice Persian rug, focussed on the new baby and the toe-curling breastfeeding, and restarted the challenge on 500 words a day: every evening, before East Enders, with my baby next to me and my loquacious toddler tucked up asleep. That manuscript became my first YA novel — for context, published three and a bit years after NaNoWriMo.
The second time I did it was in 2011 and relates to Mistake #3 I Wrote The Book They Wanted. A year after my first publisher had not only rejected a second novel but also suggested that I write a sequel to the first (which I didn’t want to do), and mere moments later decided they didn’t want me to do that either (cheers!), I got the urge to write that sequel. Who for? No one. They didn’t want it and I understood that no other publisher would. But I had the urge. That time, I reached 50,000 words, read it through once, thought it wasn’t too bad, put the file in a desktop folder and put that desktop folder into another desktop folder: the computer equivalent of under the bed.
This Is Going To Hurt
It’s my third NaNoWriMo, November 2020, that taught me the hardest lesson about my creative process and how my brain works when I’m in a challenge.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Voracious to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.