On NaNoWriMo, Writing Goals, and Creative Productivity
November is upon us, and with it the annual return of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as the cool kids call it). For those unfamiliar, the idea behind NaNoWriMo is to produce an entire novel draft in a month, which is typically defined as writing 50,000 words. I’ve dabbled with taking part in these challenges in the past, but admittedly not for many years—and, the few times I did attempt the challenge, I gave up well before reaching that 50K word count aim.
I’m a very achievement-oriented human overall, so it bothers me more than it probably should when I fail to meet a goal—even an arbitrary goal that I set for myself and no one else cares if I hit or not. This is, honestly, part of why I don’t try to do the NaNoWriMo thing most years. My usual approach to long projects isn’t to just vomit all the words out at once in a torrent. I’m typically more inclined to write a few chapters at a time, bouncing back and forth between generating new words, editing earlier chapters, and stepping back even further to fill in details of the world or characters.
This year, though, I happened to have a novel idea that’s been sitting in my head waiting for me to have time to write it. I’ve already built a lot of the world, created several of my characters, and have a rough idea of where I want the plot to go. Because of this, it felt like the perfect opportunity to give this whole NaNoWriMo thing another shot. But this has also gotten me thinking about creative goals in general, and just what makes a goal valuable.
One of the other reasons I’ve always been a bit conflicted about the concept of NaNoWriMo is that I don’t think every writer benefits from the same kind of goals. A productivity goal like “write 50,000 words” isn’t necessarily the best way to complete every kind of project, and can get you into the mindset of focusing on word count to the detriment of other things. If half of what you write is complete crap that you’ll end up cutting, have you really done yourself (or your project) any good by writing them? In reading things produced during NaNoWriMo, and perusing forums of advice aimed at participants, I get the sense a lot of NaNoWriMo writers go overboard with prioritizing quantity over quality—and that this kind of competitive format tends to reward people who take that approach.
Where I do see productivity goals as valuable is for writers who struggle with perfectionism in first drafts, which is something that I can be prone to at times. If you’re aiming to produce over 1,000 words a day, you don’t have time to tweak that one sentence to death, to dither about the minute details of a character, or to get mired in deep worldbuilding dives. You can’t fall into the endless cycle of editing the same 5 chapters over and over. Productivity goals force you to make forward progress of some kind. It probably won’t be the best stuff you’ve ever written, and will definitely need a few editing passes once you hit December—but at least you have something there that you can edit.
And, to be fair, I don’t think that words you end up cutting are wasted writing in a lot of cases. This is especially true when those extra words are devoted to exploring your world or getting to know your characters and their relationships or histories. All of that stuff may not make it into the final draft directly, but the fact that you now know it will inform the words you leave on the page, giving the story more depth.
Again, though—not every writer approaches projects in this way. There are people who can get through a project by carefully laying down each sentence as they go, or who know exactly where the story is going before they even start writing. I’m not this kind of writer—for me, if I let myself focus in on the sentence level stuff in a first draft, I would never finish anything. But people who are this kind of writer will need to set different goals. For them, trying to produce a 50,000-word draft in a month would either mean devoting every waking hour to the project, or forcing themselves to completely change how they write, and neither of those things is feasible.
There’s also an issue I face sometimes as an avid goal-setter: when the goal itself becomes a source of anxiety that turns into a roadblock rather than a motivator. When I can see I’m falling behind and might not hit my deadline, then it can turn the project into a source of dread—something I want to avoid, instead of something I’m excited to work on. This is when the goal becomes counterproductive. You’ll have to force yourself to make any progress at all and could end up completely burned out on the project by the end of it. Even worse, you feel bad about yourself because you “only” produced 25,000 words—which is, objectively, still a shit ton of words to write in a single month, and an accomplishment you should absolutely feel proud of, but if your initial goal was way higher than that it can steal your sense of pride in what you did accomplish.
Ultimately, I think one reason that a lot of writers turn to word count goals is that it’s one of the few aspects of the creative process that can be assigned a trackable metric. So much of what we do as storytellers is intangible and subjective, and nothing about the process is set in stone. At the same time, though, most people do need some way to break down a project as big as a novel into smaller milestones, or else it can feel completely overwhelming.
I will say that word count isn’t the only way to go about this. Time-based goals can be just as effective—for instance, committing to spending 10 hours a week on the project, or if that’s too much, saying you’ll work on the book at least 15 minutes every day. Time-based goals can honestly be better than word count goals if your ultimate objective is to establish a long-term writing habit.
There are also different ways of breaking down big projects other than word counts. You could set a goal of writing one chapter per day, or even break it down to the scene level. This kind of approach still has you making forward progress but without stressing about how many words you’re writing. It can also be a better way to keep you on track toward a finished manuscript. It’s a bit more focused—not just to produce a bulk of writing, but to reach the next point in the story that you’re telling.
All of this is to say that challenges like NaNoWriMo aren’t for everyone. I’m not convinced that it’s the best approach for me yet, either—but I’m going to give it a shot for the next month at least. If I have most of a novel draft come December 1st, then that’ll be awesome, but I’m also going to try very hard not to get down on myself if that doesn’t happen. As long as I’ve written more words than I would have without the goal, that’s still progress.
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