70,000 words is the goal for my first draft. It’s a carefully chosen word count, a minimum amount of words for my carefully chosen genre. The average number of words in my genre is somewhere around 100,000, so there’s room to expand in my second draft. Hopefully I gain words, and don’t just lose them. In the past, I’ve made it to about 30,000 words in a project before petering out, so trust me when I say that minimum goal is still ambitious.
Nanowrimo is National Novel Writing Month and, although I’ve participated in the past, I’ve never “won”. The goal for the month is to write 50,000, a feat which previously seemed impossible. I’ve only ever come “close” once, when I wrote 28,000 words.
I have a hard time staying motivated. I’m a planner, a plotter and inevitably, when my project veers away from my careful plot, I get overwhelmed and frustrated. A feeling that shortly leads to abandonment.
So you can imagine my feeling of excitement as I mosey into Nanowrimo with a tiny little goal of 12,000 words. That’s it. That’s all I have left before I reach my goal of 70,000 words, and it’s only taken three years to get here. Three years on the same project, with the same characters in the same world. It feels impossible to me that it’s taken so long, and it feels equally impossible that I’ve come this far. 12,000 words — I think that makes this my official home stretch.
All this to say, keep going! Don’t lose momentum and, if you do, don’t give up.
Drop some encouragement in the comments below! November might not be the month everyone manages to write a novel, but I move to make it National Cheer on a Writer Month! If you have a writer friend in your life, now’s the time to send them some love!
Kait Petry 