What 50,015 words taught me

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Inked by Sarah (Ein­se­len) at 10:29 PM

Last month, I learned I can write 2,000 words of fic­tion in an hour and a half if I don’t think too hard. It’s not good fic­tion, but it’s gram­mat­i­cally correct.

I also learned that if I quit watch­ing movies, read­ing nov­els and surf­ing the Inter­net, I can write a 50,000-word novella in one month, start to finish.

This year I par­tic­i­pated in National Novel Writ­ing Month, or NaNoW­riMo, for the sec­ond time in my life. It comes every Novem­ber and the goal is to write 50,000 words in one month just for the sake of writ­ing. The first time I par­tic­i­pated, I was a sopho­more in col­lege with noth­ing bet­ter to do besides watch YouTube videos. This time, I had an apart­ment and a full-time job. I even had to cook for myself. Was this really a good idea?

So I made a bar­gain. If I could man­age it, great. If I started to get over­whelmed, if I lost sleep or if my con­cen­tra­tion at work started to suf­fer, I would give it up imme­di­ately with­out the guilt of quitting.

But I hate to quit.

I’m just about con­vinced that the rea­son I actu­ally fin­ished NaNoW­riMo was because I don’t have a fam­ily to care for, unlike most peo­ple I know; heck, I don’t even have a boyfriend to text end­lessly. Yeah, I had to put off writ­ing for sev­eral days over Thanks­giv­ing, but the week­end after—when most peo­ple were trav­el­ing and I’d already done my road trip—I dou­bled up the writ­ing (with the help of mul­ti­ple naps and chick flicks) to recover the ground I’d lost.

Another big rea­son is that I don’t have Inter­net at home, so it was easy to limit my Inter­net usage: I made about 75 per­cent fewer trips to the library. (That also helped limit the num­ber of movies I watched!) A lap­top with­out inter­net is boring—or, not dis­tract­ing, so I could write pro­fusely in a com­par­a­tively short time.

So this is what I did: If I wasn’t out of town or com­pletely exhausted, I tried to write 2,000 words every night (and dou­ble that the last week­end). That’s about an hour and a half to two hours of work, depend­ing how much writer’s block I expe­ri­enced. I’m not a fic­tion writer, so it might have taken other peo­ple less time.

In order to find that extra… 45-plus hours of time in the month, I quit watch­ing movies almost entirely (well, I did watch five all month) and quit read­ing books, too, besides cut­ting down my time on the Inter­net. I put off dishes until the sink over­flowed (not rec­om­mended) and sim­ply skipped most clean­ing (not that big a deal; I’m not an incred­i­bly messy per­son to start with).

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

It’s not a lifestyle I could main­tain indef­i­nitely. But for a month, for the brag­ging rights and the chance to see how much free time I really have… it’s worth it. I wrote the 50,015th word at 6:50 p.m. Nov. 30, 2011. I am a NaNoW­riMo Winner.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Dec 7 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.