Episode 75: NaNoWriMo - Enough said…
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How appropriate is it that this episode beat me down and crushed my soul a little bit? I mean, that’s what this thing can do. Not literally. In fact, maybe not at all. This might be either the exhaustion or the caffeine talking. Maybe both. Maybe this is a blend or a dialogue the two are having somehow. Ehh… I’m going to leave that where it is. But on the other hand, I know we all say that caffeine is a drug as a joke, but in the right dosage, odd things can happen. Do happen. Have happened?
Don’t pretend you didn’t see the subject and cringe a bit. That is… if you know what I’m talking about, and that doesn’t look like a bunch of nonsense to you.
If you’ve participated in this endeavor, you definitely know that NaNoWriMo is not for the faint of heart. It really can’t be. It’s both an endurance run and a sprint simultaneously for people who like to push themselves beyond what could ever be considered in anyway reasonable. For creatives who have a hard time getting that figurative car to start but can run with it once it does. Which is a lot of us. But it can work in a bunch of different ways and be a bunch of different things. Something new to everyone who participates.
But none of those are explicitly forms of media, right? I recognize that I’m stretching some definitions a little bit this week. But NaNoWriMo has been an important part of my life for at least ten years…? Maybe. I don’t know. It’s all a blur, to be honest.
Which is fitting for NaNoWriMo, I guess. Yeah, I’m not really selling it, am I?
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Hi. It’s M. Welcome to episode 75.
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NaNoWriMo is the fun to say shorthand for National Novel Writing Month, a somewhat bizarre human endeavor…. It’s basically an internet-based creative writing endeavor project where a bunch of people from all walks of life come together—to varying degrees—to write 50,000 words of their novels in a 30-day month. This will average out to about 1,667 words per day. Of course, that number doesn’t divide out perfectly, so it’s actually one of those repeating decimal sorts of numbers that we all pretend came out a lot cleaner than it actually did. Fun times.
The main NaNoWriMo is in November, but April and July have “camps” like summer camp or spring camp for April, where the same thing is attempted. 50,000 words in one month. In July you get a bonus day. I guess those months are just more forgiving for some people. Or some people are less forgiving to themselves and decide to jump in all over again. Either way, maybe it is just so fun that everyone wants to do it again and again and again.
That latter point feels like a lie. Even if it isn’t. I usually participate in the camps as well.
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Yeah, I am knee-deep in this madness, and this is not my first time ever attempting NaNoWriMo. This is, however, the first month I’ve gone at with the sort of project that would always be multi-years in the making. Essentially trying to adapt a great deal of all my college readings and work in political theory into a sort of all encompassing book series with hope-punk elements, and if that doesn’t make sense, yeah I feel ya. I think I had more excitement than sense on this one.
But that’s my personal problem. I guess. And I can cry to my two cats about it and be met with their overwhelming indifference at my leisure.
Right now, I should probably tell you the story of how I got into NaNoWriMo. That magical tale of a whimsical time in my life when I first dicovered it (Music cuts) and yeah, I really don’t remember when I got into NaNoWriMo.
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It was just always there, I guess. Well, not always. I think I got into it during high school because I can remember it being a huge deal at my high school. We had a lot of aspiring writers who inevitably fled to the wonders of the internet. Inevitably because there’s a strong correlation with being creative and being more introverted. Or I’m pretty sure there is. I didn’t bother to go digging for a study, but it’s the sort of observation that I’ve repeatedly made. And it also would explain why NaNoWriMo has caught on as well as it did and the way that it did.
That’s how many people come into it: the internet. And NaNoWriMo was designed as an online endeavor. Not necessarily because of the whole introvert-trend. Online interactions are generally easier for everybody, yes. For one, you can better control the parameters of your interactions. On the other hand, they are greatly more efficient. Distance being something rendered irrelevant. And physical interactions are removed and therefore do not need to be accounted for.
But more than that, even though a fair bit of people don’t—myself included—participants do have the option of registering on an online website, which would allow them to claim ownership of the eventual—being optimistic here—win. Also, there are generally prizes for winners verified by the NaNoWriMo system, various events that system will tell you about, and a better support neetwork.
And honestly, it’s that latter bit that I think is the most alluring. Not that I don’t like verified wins and prizes. But there’s a bunch of different ways of getting that in other contexts of your life.
NaNoWriMo, however, or the community you could have, isn’t tied to the website. You can find fellow participants anywhere there are people online. The real commonality is that you are attempting this somewhat stupid stunt.
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To me, NaNoWriMo was always the equivalent of a holiday season before it was a set event or activity. I think that is because I stumbled across it in high school, which was a somewhat weird time in my life creatively speaking. To be honest, I was the clichéd gifted child who didn’t exactly have to try hard but did have to pay many a time for her tendency to procrastinate.
Different skills, I guess. But I don’t particularly recommend my set.
But even if it isn’t exactly true, I did like I had a lot of spare time on my hands in high school, especially during class. Not great of me and apologies to all my teachers, but during the question and answer portion of the lessons, when I had no questions and answers tended to be rehashings of the lesson tailored to one specific person, I would just write. And sure, that’s not a great thing to do, but it seemed to be more efficient.
When I say a had a lot of time in high school, I really had a bunch of moments that I could gather together. This being a great example. As I saw it, anyone who needed that extra bit of attention should have it, but if I could spend those few minutes doing something a bit more productive than waiting, I would.
But to tally up all those random moments, there was the school announcements, getting to class before the bell, the lesson finishing before the other bell… Those sorts of things: little moments add up to a lot of opportunities. And I spent them writing. A word here and there really adds up. And writing on the fly like that was possible with loose-leaf paper and a folder. I even used to use different colored pens from day to day, so I could visually see what progress I was making when word counting wasn’t… Well, it could be done, but remember this whole sort of thing was about maximizing time. Word counts by hand, even with shorthanded tricks, would not exactly help with that.
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To me, NaNoWriMo wasn’t really a creative spark or push. In many ways, I already had a sense of momentum. It was called boredom. And also being stuck in the walls of an American high school. Having little choice can sometimes work out in your favor, after all. But well, it… it came in November, and I think that might have been the appeal of it. The fall season of my high school years wasn’t exactly something I looked forward to. I don’t think it was all that kind.
I’ve mentioned this before. There’s an episode on this feed about the Nightmare Before Christmas, not just the movie but the musical arrangement my high school marching band used the year before I joined. The band that year did incredibly well. It lead to a lot of inside jokes and a sense of camaraderie that was hard to jump into. In fact, I never really fully integrated into a clique that was always presented as a cohesive one. Like isn’t it a joke or part of other jokes that the band kids band together, no pun intended. Okay pun kind of intended.
Inevitably though, the truth is going to be more complicated than that, and it really was. There will always be exceptions to rules, people who mistaken threw their weight behind the wrong hobby, and people in places of authority whose only aspiration was reliving their glory days rather than improving as a person. Never mind helping others to grow.
And I am genuinely trying not to throw too much shade. I’m trying to be mature about it. After all, I stayed in marching band all four years of high school because I thought it was going to help me get into a college far away from my hometown, which it might have. I can’t know either way. College admissions are incredibly complicated, but I doubt it hurt my application. Extra-curriculars are important, after all. And marching band is kind of like a sport but also musical. And it’s not something every teen was jumping into.
I am grateful for what it did give me in starting the rest of my life, but I will say that if that assistance could have come in some other way, I would have gone that route. I understand that I made a choice, but I just wish I could have made a different one.
I can try to be mature about it, but this is the sort of regret that stings more as time goes on. For various reasons. For one, it sucked up a lot of my time in high school with those rehearsals in which I constantly counted down just how many minutes were left. That’s time I can’t get back. Time when I was young and supposedly free. Essentially wasted, almost.
Second, it created rifts between me and the people I genuinely did care about because of the time commitment and the culture involved. And while I can still hold onto these friendships, damage was done, seemingly for nothing. And I can’t say I’m all that close with my bandmates.
Oh, wait no, it wasn’t nothing. Because now I can’t clean out my Facebook friends list or delete the account because I definitely know the sort of people who would cast out their minor children for some perceived offense, and while I no longer live in the area, my mother does, and she is definitely the sort of person who should be scooping up a child in an emergency like that. She just has to know where to go.
And, like, at some point, I picked up this obligation. I can’t get rid of it. Not so easily. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s something I just assumed is stuck to me and I could peel off if I wasn’t so self-loathing.
I don’t know, but my mom will move soon-ish, and then I’m somewhat free. But the bitterness is probably going to stay.
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Sure, I made peace with and take responsibility for your choices, but while I won’t put anyone on blast, I will say that my experience and the dysfunction of my program didn’t need to be as pronounced as bad as it was. We could have had a more reliable color guard instructor for one. Or a band room whose lock wasn’t so easy to break into. And then there’s the time money would keep going missing from students’ bags. Like the salary they got at their part time jobs. Or the fact that not all of us who had things stolen felt comfortable reporting it because we were pretty sure we knew who it was, and nepotism was the norm.
A celebrated one at that, which was also bizarre.
Believe me, I know this sort of thing happens all the time. But when the rhetoric is that everyone in this group belongs and that this is a time we will stick together, the realization that you’re being fed someone else’s delusions is a bitter one. By halfway through the season of my sophomore year, I knew the truth but in the way one knows a dirty little secret: confidently but close to one’s chest all the while you are pretending and acting like it isn’t true.
Halfway through the season was October, almost November, mind you. By then I already knew about NaNoWriMo. It might have been from watching book vloggers on YouTube. Maybe it was a Facebook algorithm-thing. After all, this happened back when thir website wasn’t so menacing and all up in your business but could offer vaguely helpful suggestions. Or one of my other Facebook friends were on that group and then its posts ended up in my feed through their interactions. The point is I don’t know. I really can’t even check. Other people were luckier on the whole, cleaning out the friends list front.
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I was never all that active in the NaNoWriMo world. I float in the background and jump in on writing sprints, but I don’t comment on my output or validate my novel. It has always been nice to simply exist in this community at this time of year. A sanctuary you could almost say but also not. Look, during difficult time of year, NaNoWriMo was a beautiful reminder of the thing that I love, the thing that actually gave me a sense of joy and purpose.
First, NaNoWriMo helped me cope with marching band. And then shortly after I finished high school, my grandmother died, and Thanksgiving… Well, itwas the sort of holiday Mom and I celebrated to make her and Dad happy. So when they were gone, there really wasn’t much of a point, was there? Actually don’t answer that. My mom and I didn’t think there was a point. Or we felt like it was going to bring more sadness than anything else.
It’s a day off work that I now get to spend writing an ill-advised and poorly thought out book. To other people, it’s a chance to be creative or to knock off an item on their bucket list.
It’s one of the most wholesome things on the internet right now, I think. It’s an excuse to do something kind of hard but appealing with other people, to whatever personal ends you may have.
But at the most basic level, there is something therapeutic or cathartic about the simple act of creation.
I make this episode in part as a response to the inevitable thought pieces or that one thought piece that keeps being revived just to make unwantred that are critical of this endeavor or those that argue that (quote even if I’m paraphrasing) “not everyone can write a novel nor should they.” (end quote). As I see it, all of that is missing a point. The completed novel is a destination, but this is not just about the destination. Because a lot of us won’t get there, to be brutally honest.
It’s about the journey and whatever reason we had in starting it.
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Unless plagiarism is involved, no two novels are alike. No two stories can be alike, and even the same story read by two different people can vary dramatically.
NaNoWriMo is an event not so much about making novels—because 50,000 is a bit short for a novel—but an event about the stories we tell and how the act of storytelling fits into that. Because it is an online event, an online community that meets for three month long events but sometimes never leave. It’s a group that provides varying levels of support as needed or possible. It’s a place to gather research or do whatever else is on your artistic journey. It’s a setting, a venue, a place to exist or to express this aspect of your creativity. Or to begin to. To try to. To dabble in something you thought was interesting…
You get it. I mean, it’s a blank slate that you can bring anything to. This is all me being redundant. And frankly, at some point, you either see the wondrous possibilities of NaNoWriMo or you don’t. For those of us to do, National Novel Writing Month is a part of us. It means a lot to us. Maybe too much.
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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from Sounds like an Earful. Thank you for listening. If you like the show, please consider leaving a review or checking out our other productions.
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