The End of NaNoWriMo: Why Do We Write?
Maybe you have a novel now. Maybe not. Either way, now’s a good time to address why you took this journey to begin with and where to go from here.
Well, here we are. The beginning of December, with pencils down and faces planted into pillows out of exhaustion. For my part, I somehow managed to reach my 50,000 word goal by November 20th, and then took the rest of the month off in order to spend the holidays with my family, with no more daily goals scribbled onto my whiteboard to haunt me.
NaNoWriMo is over, and I think it’s safe to say that everyone is at a different emotional and writing-wise place following this event. For some, 50,000 was simply a landmark on the road toward their finished product, but for others, it’s still a point in their future. All of these outcomes are equally awesome, because they mean you’re still writing. You’re still trying.
That’s what I’ve realized during this week free from writing. I could have kept going and added more words to my novel — in fact, that was my original plan — but sanity took preference, and I’m glad it did. Because writing isn’t always about slapping words on the page, even if that is a huge part of it (especially with NaNoWriMo). Writing is also about being.
Writing is a colorful place in your mind where you can go when you’re feeling a certain way. It’s a flickering memory that belongs to a person who does not exist. It’s a message you want the world to hear. It is an experience, and a struggle, but most of all, at the end of this month, it is you. It is your experiences boiled down through some sort of alchemy — all the sadness, anger, pain, joy, and love you’ve ever felt forged into something greater than yourself. The personal made universal.
Storytelling is an eternal, ever-evolving art form, but as much as it changes, it stays the same in at least one way — it is always about the human experience. Even in stories that aren’t about humans, the anthropomorphic perspective leaks through, because humans aren’t actually capable of being anything but ourselves.
Writing is about turning the personal into the universal.
And, oh, all the things we can be. We’ve learned to fly above the clouds, and dive deep into the seas, and live on the tips of mountains. We’ve seen the glories of nature, and we’ve destroyed them in equal turn. We climbed to the tip-top of the Earth’s crust, but we weren’t satisfied, so we learned how to climb higher. We broke through the shell of gases that encase our planet and flew amongst planets and stars older than we can even imagine. We did this, all of this, simply because we could. That curiosity, it’s what makes humans so silly, so creative, so spectacular. It’s also what makes us such a vain, brash, and egotistical species — nothing but a blip against the enormous, interwoven tapestry of the universe. We are a contradiction, but one worth exploring.
And writing is how we explore. It’s how we capture all those sensations never lived, and all of those experienced time and time again. Galaxies beyond our reach, colors that don’t exist, hidden creatures at the bottom of the sea. The birth of a new life, smiles exchanged over warm cups, the feeling of waves stripping away the sand underneath your feet.
We are historians, documenting the world around us in exquisite, if often fictional, detail. It’s like Neil Gaiman said, in a quote that I have treasured throughout this journey of writing:
Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.
This, I think, is the ultimate discovery of every fiction writer. That they’ve been lying to their audience all this time, and that they’ve told the truth, their truth, while doing so. It’s a contradiction, an oxymoron. It makes no sense, and yet it makes all the sense in the world. In every character we create, we put a piece of ourselves, a side of our personality, our essence, that comes alive in its own right under our watchful eyes and carefully molding fingertips. In every plot point, in every twist and turn of the story, we imbue the words with a vital sense of urgency, not because the reader is necessarily afraid of gun-waving vigilantes or deviously-plotting villains, but because they are afraid for the lives of the people we’ve created. They care about things that never happened, people that never lived, a world that will never be truly real.
That’s what writing is, at the end of day. Putting just enough of yourself, of your care, into your story until others can care about it, too. Until it becomes real, a tangible combination of swirling sensations and shaking love, stuffed into words that come alive in front of your reader’s eyes. Until it’s human.
That’s my goal, anyway, whenever I write. It can be hard, often impossible, to accomplish every time you sit down to write. Some days, the words don’t come out right; others, they flow from my fingers like they are fated. But it’s worth it, in the end, because what you’re left with is a story that has the ability to shake the foundations of a reader’s mind.
But to do all that, you have to find out what your mind is like first. You have to discover who you are, underneath all the trimmings and trappings of the stories you build around yourself like sand castles. You have to let the waves sweep the sand out from between your toes, out into the great beyond of the ocean, and find out who you are without that ground to stand on. What’s your story? What kind of character are you? What kind of a human are you?
The only way to find that answer is by living, and then finding ways to translate that life into the written word. It’s a journey — a difficult, wonderful, painful one. During it, you might realize it isn’t a story you want (or are ready) to tell. Or you might figure out that the story is a lot longer and more intricate than you first thought. Whatever your path, the best thing to keep in mind coming out of the stressful experience that is National Novel Writing Month is simply: Just keep going. Just keep trying. Just keep writing.
It’s incredible that we as novelists have been able to take this step toward our finished manuscripts, together, during this incredibly short and intense period of time. Personally, I’m still astonished at all I managed to accomplish, and I think you should be, too. Even if you didn’t finish, even if you did, you had the courage to try, to write, to express yourself.
Now, all you need to do is keep doing that.
Writing a novel and living your life are both huge, overwhelming adventures that take a whole heck ton of courage and persistence. Sometimes, they can feel like uphill battles that will never be won, but that’s because winning isn’t the point. For as long as you’re taking steps forward on this strange, twisting path, there is nowhere you cannot go, because there is nowhere you need to be except exactly where you are.
