I first participated in National Novel Writing Month over twenty years ago. For the few of you reading that may not know: National Novel Writing Month is an online-based challenged to write 50,000 words in 30 days, traditionally during November.
NaNoWriMo worked for me at the time because prior to attempting it I would write a single page and I’d hate it so I’d stop. There’s no time to hate single pages when aiming for 50k in 30 days, you have to move on to the next page and hate that one and the page after that and maybe eventually amongst all of those pages there will be a page you don’t hate so much. Maybe more than one.
People are fond of claiming that The Night Circus was “written during NaNoWriMo” which is a misleading oversimplification of the process.
The project that became The Night Circus was messily drafted over two separate NaNoWriMo Novembers and then it was rewritten and revised and rewritten some more for approximately five years.
The NaNoWriMo draft of The Night Circus bares very, very little resemblance to the finished book. How little? Celia isn’t in it. It is a mess of tents and nonsense but it was a jumping off point, which is what it needed to be. You can jump higher when you have something to stand on and not just a blank page.
At the time, NaNoWriMo was framed very much as a personal challenge that came with two potentially magical things: peer pressure and a deadline. I will be forever grateful to Chris Baty for coming up with it as an idea, it was precisely what I needed to train myself to write all of those pages and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
It has been disheartening watching how NaNoWriMo as an organization has changed since Chris’s departure in 2013, particularly in recent years. I have not participated officially in over a decade. They asked me to be on their writers board and I declined.
I missed most of the news around the terrible handling of their website forums last year but I did of course see their latest atrocious statements about use of AI.
My previous contacts at NaNoWriMo.org are no longer with the organization, so I wrote to every email address I could find, including the interim director’s, asking them to remove my name from their promotional materials.
They did not respond to my email but both of my Pep Talks were removed from their site, something I did not ask for. I sent them another, longer email requesting that they remove my name from their About page. It was removed shortly after. To date I have not received a direct response from anyone at NaNoWriMo.org.
I am archiving both of my Pep Talks here for anyone who wants them, whether you’re writing in November or another month or you just need some encouragement or an extended metaphor kitten anecdote.
National Novel Writing Month is an idea, separate from the organization. You can write your 50k in any 30 days and there are plenty of places to find delightfully satisfying graphs for the tracking of words. You can devise your own similar challenges to do alone or with friends. This year for the month of October I’ve been writing three pages a day longhand to exercise my fountain pens. Do whatever you need to do in order to get those words on pages, no matter what you plan on doing with them afterwards.
This is my original National Novel Writing Month Pep Talk, written in 2011.
Dear brave, beautiful NaNoWriMo writer,
I feel a bit like I am writing this from the other side of the looking glass. I am more accustomed to being the participant and not the pep talker. Also, “pep” is a strange word. The Online Etymology Dictionary informs me that it dates from 1912 as a shortened form of “pepper” figuratively meaning spirit or energy. (“Pep talk” only dates back to 1926.) It sounds to me more like a soft drink or a nickname for a small dog. Feel free to think of this pep talk as a small dog full of spirit or energy.
I have been where you are. I suspect this might feel like someone yelling encouragement from a far dry shore, sipping a fancy-glassed drink with a little paper umbrella precariously perched atop it, waving with my free hand while you swim through icy, toe-numbing water. But I have been in that water, many times. My toes have been numb during those dismal days when even minimal wordage seems unattainable and that 50K beach is barely visible through the salt-spray surf. There are probably sharks involved in this analogy as well.
(True confession: I love analogies. I also love adverbs. There, I said it. I love adverbs so much I sometimes contemplate getting an –ly tattooed behind my ear to encourage the whispering of sweet, sweet adverbs. But I digress.)
I participated in my first NaNoWriMo in 2003, after years of thinking about writing and not actually putting words down on paper. I managed around 15K before I quit.
I’m not sure why—perhaps I am determined, perhaps I am simply stubborn—but I attempted again the next year and made it to 50k. And again the year after that, and the year after that, and so on and so forth, the most recent being 2009. I have a 6/1 winning record over 7 years. I think my personal best is in the range of 80k in 27 days or something like that. The pride that comes with that winner icon is still a joy. (I particularly liked the Viking-themed year, those were good icons.) And I do so love a progress bar, that gorgeous visual representation of word count progress. I’m a visual person, so that bar helps, it really does.
2010 marked the first NaNoWriMo that I haven’t participated since that first try, and I didn’t have the time mostly because I was in the midst of my final edits for The Night Circus, which began life as a surprise tangent in NaNovel ’05 and was very roughly, sprawlingly drafted during NaNo ’06 & ’07. I am aware that this is cheating. I’m sorry. In my defense, I’m not certain it had enough plot at that point to be considered the same novel.
The circus was my variation on the wise and ancient NaNo wisdom: when in doubt, just add ninjas. I had this plodding, Edward Gorey-esque thing with mysterious figures in fur coats being mysterious and doing very little else. I got tremendously bored with it because nothing was happening so I sent the otherwise boring characters to a circus. And it worked. I ended up tossing that beginning and focusing purely on the circus. An imaginary location I created out of desperation expanded and changed and became its own story over many non-November months of revisions and more revisions and now it is all grown-up and book-shaped and published and bestselling. And it all started with NaNoWriMo.
I like to think of NaNo-ing as excavating. You uncover different things at the 30K mark than you do at 10K. Things that felt like desperate, random nonsense on page 72 (the abandoned broken pocket watch, a partially obscured tattoo, that taxidermied marmot on the mantelpiece) are suddenly important and meaningful on page 187. Everything could hinge on the fate of that marmot. Or the marmot may be a red herring. Or perhaps the marmot is just a marmot. You have to keep writing to find out.
Even if you’re an outliner, leave room for the unexpected things to sneak in. Surprises are half the fun, the spontaneous road trips through tangents and subplots. They might end up being more important than you think. And if they’re not, you can always edit them out after November. No one has to know so for now, for this glorious November, you can do whatever you please. It’s your world to create and explore and even destroy if you want.
I wish I could think of cool, witty things to say. I want to mix you each the beverages of your choice, cocktails or sodas or tea or foam-topped espresso drinks that all magically maintain perfect drinking temperature. Bring you truffles or tira misu or chocolate-covered popcorn and give you wrist massages while whispering these encouraging, fortune-cookie bits of wisdom-esque whatnot garnered in my years of NaNo-ing:
Never delete anything. If you can’t stand to look at it, change the font to white and keep going.
If possible, get a running start. It gives you flexibility for later in the month when you desperately need to do something, anything that doesn’t involve writing once in a while.
Do something, anything that doesn’t involve writing once in a while. Take a walk, go to a museum, do yoga, paint your toenails, spin around in circles. Shake your brain up so the ideas can move around.
Backup. Frequently. Flash drives are your friends. Also, I hear you can store things on clouds now but I’m not sure how that works. It sounds very whimsical, though, and I am a fan of whimsy.
Take risks. (Microsoft Word wanted to autocorrect that to “Take care.” Clearly, Word does not understand NaNoWriMo. Also, this is why I normally write in Scrivener. Scrivener would never suggest such a thing.)
When in doubt, just add ninjas. (Ninjas do not need to be actual ninjas.) (But they can be.)
Let yourself be surprised.
I wish you happy, daring writing laced with surprises. Have fun. Bonne chance.
Erin Morgenstern
This is my second National Novel Writing Month Pep Talk, from 2019. It is meant for the later weeks of the month when it can be difficult to see the forest for the words.
Greetings, dearest daring NaNoWriMo writer!
Come closer.
Let me tell you a story.
One day last year my kitten, Vesper, was suddenly afraid of the ceiling fan.
The ceiling fan had always been there. We’d had Vesper for several weeks. She had been settling in and getting comfortable, learning to read tarot cards and getting the couch all fuzzy. She was overly fond of licking my toes.
Vesper was aware of the ceiling fan.
But now on this particular afternoon the ceiling fan was scary when yesterday it was just there.
To be clear: she was genuinely frightened. Tail all puffy, hissing and chattering in the ceiling fan’s direction, hiding behind the bookshelves and staring warily upward.
She kept trying to find places where she could see the ceiling fan but it couldn’t see her and eventually I took her into another room where she could be free from the terrible gaze of the ceiling fan just as a flock of turkeys was passing by the window.
Vesper hadn’t seen the wild turkeys before.
She hid under the bed for awhile after that.
My husband had been away at the time and when he got home and I was explaining Vesper’s sudden fan-terror which now sounded particularly odd since at that moment Vesper was sprawled out on the table calmly licking a paw in full view of the ceiling fan.
Fearless.
Do you know what had happened and how this has anything to do with NaNoWriMo?
The fan speed changed.
I had flipped the fan from medium to low without thinking about it, even though it was usually on medium. Vesper noticed.
Ceiling fan on medium = fine and normal and expected. Ceiling fan on low = STRANGE AND TERRIFYING.
November is the ceiling fan. Or maybe your story is the ceiling fan. Or maybe a giant plot hole you only now noticed is the ceiling fan. Maybe the ceiling fan is just a ceiling fan. Something’s the ceiling fan in this extended metaphor kitten anecdote, just go with it.
Something is different now than it was before. Maybe. Probably.
This deep into November the pace and the wind changes and it doesn’t feel the way it did before and maybe neither does your story. Crisp and cold and strange and possibly suddenly unfamiliar.
It might not look the same as it did yesterday, or last week.
It doesn’t look the way it did when you started.
And it certainly doesn’t look the way it did in your head.
(An aside for another metaphor: I have heard that Ann Patchett describes the version of the story in her head as a beautiful butterfly and the writing process involves taking that beautiful, fluttering butterfly and pinning it down onto the page. I think about that butterfly a lot. The story will never look on the page the way it did when it was fluttering in your head and it never could.)
But the story will look different tomorrow. And it could become an entirely different creature post-November. The important thing is getting it down on the page, because that’s how the story starts to become whatever it’s going to become.
You might not know what speed the ceiling fan should be set at yet. You may have no idea where all these wild turkeys came from or where they are going or what they symbolize. They’re probably a metaphor. (In this pep talk they are actual turkeys in my actual yard. They leave footprints in the snow in the winter. Vesper has become accustomed to them and she never even noticed the raccoons.)
It’s okay to not know.
I haven’t participated in National Novel Writing Month myself in years but I have spent most of that time writing and rewriting and rewriting a book that is now book-shaped and called The Starless Sea.
It did not look the way it does now for a long, long time.
It was written and rewritten and rewritten again and again and even when I wasn’t sure where it was going I kept putting down words and those words led to more words and different words and eventually I found what the story wanted to be and where it wanted to go. NaNoWriMo taught me how to do that, even when my December 1st is a different day looming somewhere in the future. I made it through even though there were times when I was certain that it would never, ever be book-shaped.
You find your way through the darkness and you work your way through the story and there are possibly-frightening things in the dark that may or may not be ceiling fans but you have your words and a torch and a sword and probably an animal companion of some sort. You can borrow an imaginary version of Vesper if you’d like. She will not be helpful but she is cute and the imaginary version is hypoallergenic.
And she can remind you that it’s okay to be afraid of the ceiling fan, no matter what your personal ceiling fan might be.
It’s just a ceiling fan.
You can change its speed and change your world.
(You have no control over the turkeys, because they’re wild, but all stories should have some uncontrollable wildness in there somewhere.)
You do not have to make your story perfect right now. You don’t even have to get it right. You only need to get it on the page. That’s all.
Don’t look back. Keep moving forward with your torch and your sword and your imaginary kitten companion. There is an ending to be found, whether you find it this month or further farther deeper later on. You can wander back and choose different paths because this is your world and your rules.
Go with it and see where it takes you.
There’s magic left in these late November days yet to be found.
You can find it.
I believe in you.
(Vesper does, too.)
With best November wishes,
Erin Morgenstern