Word Count Is Only Important If You Want It to Be

So it’s almost the end of Spooky Season (not really a fan of that term and yet here I am using it, good grief), and I know for a lot of you that means one thing: National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo, aka NaNo) is almost upon us. Starting on November 1st, many of you will hunker down at your keyboards and start banging out a novel. The goal is a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. That averages out to 1,667 words per day. If that sounds daunting to you, you’re not wrong, but there are two things I’d like to say about the NaNo word count. They may sound contradictory at first, but they’re not: 1) 1,667 words a day is not as bad as it sounds, and 2) you should absolutely not beat yourself up if you have trouble hitting it.

The thing about NaNo is there are a lot of new writers trying their hand at a novel for the first time every November. If you’ve never written anything longer than a short story or even a novella, you may not have ever cranked out more than 1000 words in a day. And that’s totally okay. Writing is basically a muscle in your brain, and like any muscle you have to train it—work it out and get it in better shape than it was when you started.

So you might sit down to write one day and hit a speed bump. Maybe you didn’t research something you need to know to keep going. Maybe you didn’t outline enough, or outline at all (shout out to the pantsers!) and wrote yourself into a corner, and have to figure a way out. Maybe your kid sprayed puke all over the living room like spin art during the time you’d carved out to write, and you only have time to write 100 words. Those are all valid reasons to not hit your daily goal. Well, except maybe the outlining thing, but that’s a topic for another day.

The point is, NaNo isn’t some winner take all event. You don’t actually lose anything if you don’t hit 50,000 words by November 30th. If you’re a new or returning writer, you may overestimate how many words you can crank out in a day. If that starts happening to you, just think of NaNo as training. Your getting that writing muscle into shape. You’re finding your way, figuring out what works for you, and if you realize 1,667 words a day isn’t in the cards for you, it’s not the end of the world. Maybe you can only write 500 words a day. Maybe you have to skip Wednesdays, but can write twice as long on Sunday mornings. Maybe you can only write when Saturn is in retrograde. Okay well that last one would be really weird, but guess what? It’s nobody’s business, as long as it works for you.

Maybe by the end of November you’ll have only written 30,000 words, but your daily word count is increasing. Maybe by the end of November you’ll have made changes to your routine that allow you to write more at the end of the month than you were at the start of NaNo. THAT is the real gift NaNoWriMo gives you. If you end the month with a 50,000 word novel, that is fantastic and amazing, and that is to be celebrated. But if you finish the month with a scattered mess of 20,000 words AND you figured out that you have to get up at 5am to find time to write, or you realize the most you can do is 800 words a day, that should be celebrated too! It’s all about finding what works for and sticking to it. Bottom line: if you come out of it having learned something about yourself that will help you as you venture ever deeper into the treacherous rough sea called writing, you won NaNoWriMo.

It just dawned on me I used over 600 words just to say ‘It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.‘

In what could be seen as the ultimate hypocrisy, I’m not participating in NaNo this year. Truth be told, I’ve only tried it twice, and both times it went abysmally. However, those godawful attempts helped me strengthen that writing muscle and taught me some things about myself, and I say with as much pride as a cynical, mostly unpublished (so far!) writer can have that the reason I’m not participating is because I’m 50,000 words into my new novel, so I’ll be chipping away at that all month long and rooting all of you on. And if any of you are curious, I very rarely write over 1200 words in a day, so I have the utmost respect for anyone who can manage 1,667.

So good luck in the trenches, find what works you, and above all else just keep writing.