The NaNoWriMo Hangover

By Kasie Whitener

National Novel Writing Month or “NaNoWriMo” is a frenzied 30-days of creation. The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel. Thousands of people participate every year. Imagine how many novels are out there right now as a result of this ambitious month.

Get Jodie Cain Smith’s take on NaNoWriMo 2016.

I have never written “The End” as the last two words but I have made the 50k goal four of the five years I’ve participated. This year I stopped at 50,392.

On December 1, I woke up with the worst hangover.

It’s like the morning after losing a football game. At first, blurry-eyed and foggy-brained, you wonder what exactly happened last night. Then it comes flooding back to you: the turnovers, the punt run-back for a touchdown, the poor play by the offensive line. We lost.

Waking up after a loss is the worst. Remembering how things went awry, wishing you could take it all back, feeling sad all over again.

December 1 is like that for NaNoWriMos. We know we should continue the work. The book is not finished yet. But we’ve been writing so much for so long, we just can’t bring ourselves to compose another scene. There is no dialogue left. No character’s fatal flaw. No coincidental circumstances. No villain nor valiant heroine. There’s no story left in our fingertips.

For the first time in 30 days, we’re not required to live in the world of the novel. In fact, we’re expected to walk away. Rejoin your regular life already in progress. Get back to family and friends and football.

The frenzy of NaNoWriMo consumes the writer. Every year I replace my morning gym workouts (5:30 a.m. until 7 a.m.) with writing. I can typically get between 1800 and 2500 words in that time. If I stay on track, I can surpass the 50k before the 30^th.

This year I took a long holiday over Thanksgiving and on Monday, November 27^th, I was 15,008 words short with four days to go. That’s 3,762 words a day I’d need to make up the gap and finish on time.

On Thursday, I had 10,000 words to go. I knocked out 5,000 between 6 and 9 that morning and sat down at 4 p.m. determined to get the other 5k done before the Redskins game kicked off at 8:25.

When I hit 50,392, I quit. There are still at least three major scenes to go before the novel is finished. At least 6,000 more words. But I’d done what I set out to do, so I closed the laptop.

Then the Cowboys beat the Redskins.

And December 1 was miserable.

I couldn’t write anything. I couldn’t focus on the screen. I couldn’t even think about Neverland and Lost Boys and Peter Pan that unscrupulous tyrant.

The NaNoWriMo website told me I’d won but I felt like it had won. NaNo had taken all I had to give. Now I’ll just be sucking down ice water for the next few weeks.