For anyone who doesn’t know, I’m a writer.
I know, shocker.
But I don’t just mean that I’m a journalist, I’m also a self-published author. I’ve written two books, and am working on two more, which has lead me to participate in NaNoWriMo.
For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a non-profit organization, and also a challenge for the month of November (which is national novel writing month), to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month.
For anyone who does know what NaNoWriMo stands for, I’m sorry.
I’m kidding, but only a little.
I’m so privileged and thankful to say that I get to write every day, and I love what I do, but 50,000 words is a struggle. If I miss a day, I’m 1,677 words behind, and I know that doesn’t sound like a lot but to put it in perspective:
This column is 364 words. That means I’d have to write this column 138 times. In college at OU, where I have my bachelor’s from, journalism professors taught us that you never know how much space you have to fill, so writing needed to be short to maximize space. I’ve always tried to write short, with the most amount of information in the least amount of space. When I interned at Metro Parent Magazine, I’d be given an assignment of a story with 100 words max.
But now, my assignment is 50,000 words, which feels daunting. Especially since it’s something I assigned to myself, and I don’t want to let myself down.
My first two books are 59,320 and 67,127 words, which is short for a book anyway. Sometimes I read books with 400-600 pages and am in awe over how someone could have that many words to put into a story.
But I’m going to try. Maybe not 600 pages worth, but I’m determined to achieve my goal of 50,000 words this month. That should finish out my third book, hopefully by my birthday (Nov. 28).
And so, to anyone else trying to achieve a seemingly-impossible goal I say this: good luck, you’re not alone in this, and some progress is still progress, even if it doesn’t feel like it.