NaNoWriMo- Liesl

             And thus ends the great NaNoWriMo. Thirty days and nights of submersing ourselves in the great quest of writing a single novel, thirty days of words, and typing like the world will end if we do not finish.  Thirty days and nights of having words, sentences, plots and characters swirling around in our heads, driving us mad until we spew them out on paper and tell their story. Thirty days.  30,000 words. 300,000 people. NaNoWriMo.

            Thirty five days ago, my classmates and I embarked on a quest which we were not sure that we could complete. We aimed to write a novel in thirty days totaling somewhere around 30,000 words a day. That is, (if you care to do the math) a thousand words PER NIGHT. We arrived at school in high spirits on the first of November, eagerly awaiting the start of our quest. We would begin to write that night. Pumped and ready to roll, we departed school to begin working.

            I know for one, that I sat down, and promptly crashed. I had no idea what I was going to write about, no concept whatsoever of even where to start, and on top of that, I only had an hour before I had to leave for practice. I only got about 700 words done that night.

            The next two weeks were easier, I blazed through my words, writing mostly total junk with a few little jewels in there somewhere, hitting the ten thousand mark, then twenty. When I got to twenty one thousand though, I hit the invisible wall of writers block.

            On somewhere about November 21^st, I no longer felt the urge to write. When I sat down at the computer, I had nothing to say, and no desire to push through. All I wanted to do was… something else instead of write. My classmates were feeling the same way. On Friday the 23^rd, we had a sub in class, and none of us felt like writing, so we asked her if we could just hang out or read for the class, we were all so bored.

            Eventually though, we all pushed through. We jumped over that wall of not writingness, and managed to find a way to finish. After I hit that wall, climbed over it, I know that I hit the ground running. Every night, I got a little further ahead, and I eventually finished on Wednesday, November 28^th. I was done. Everything that I had stressed about, cried about, and every bad moment, (and good one along the way) seemed almost (almost) worthwhile.

            We all ended up finishing on time. On Monday of this week, we had a “Thank God It’s Over” party in class, with brownie sundaes, mac and cheese, and veggie sticks.

            My Facebook status that night? “30,000 words. Take THAT NaNoWriMo.”