My NaNoWriMo 2023: Part 3 - Writing!
Breaking down the statistics behind getting words on the page - and embracing failure.
In case you missed it, this is the third part in a series where I dissect my journey through NaNoWriMo 2023; you can find part one here and part two here.
In this post I’ll break down my statistics of my overall progress across November, my daily word count rollercoaster, and how I accepted a failure early on in the month.
The Results & Milestones
Before we get into the numbers, it’s important to recognize some of the key dates and milestones that defined my month of November 2023. In NaNo, the daily goal is always a milestone that feels great to hit - going above it is even better - but as we look at the progress over the month, the milestones stretch out a little longer, occurring every few days or weeks.
Some important goals and dates that are useful to keep in mind:
I started NaNo ‘23 on 11/1 (obviously)
Every 10k was considered a word count milestone (10,000, 20,000, etc.) that I attempted to reward myself for (more about rewards in the next part of this series)
I finished by reaching my 50,000 word goal on 11/25
Note: I did write a couple hundred words after 11/25, though mostly I just relaxed at that point
Overall Progress
My overall progress graph, which shows my daily word counts over the entire month, looks exceptionally good at first glance - aided by a strong start that kept me above NaNo’s default pace. Let’s take a look at the graph NaNo’s website generated.
You can see where I ended on November 25, and only wrote a few hundred words in the days after that. What’s misleading about this graph though, is that this is a comparison of my daily word count against NaNo’s standard daily word count of 1,667 - my daily goal was 2,000. We’ll look more closely at daily word goals in the next section, but for now, let’s break the overall graph down by a few additional metrics.
Let’s add breaks into the graph by story act (light blue) and weeks (purple). Also, I’ve added weekly totals (green) - reminder, with a 2k daily word goal, my weekly par should have been 14,000 words.
(Note: Nov. 1 fell on a Wednesday this year, so this graph considers 7-day weeks from the start date, not a Sun-Sat break down.)
My strongest week was Week 1, which makes sense because not only was I excited to tackle writing, but because Act 1 of my outline was the most complete. When Week 2 began, I was already having to brainstorm scenes on the fly because my outline would say things like ‘B-Story happens’ where I wanted a chapter dedicated to my B-Story. The ‘A-Story’ had a more detailed breakdown of points for each scene. In fact, my B-Story had almost no planning behind it, other than basic premise - it was pantsing at its finest.
I had two dedicated “double down days” (reminder, those are days where I attempted to hit 4,000 words) on 11/4 and 11/17. Because I started so strong, the 11/4 double day is barely noticeable on the graph (because I was already up almost 4,000 words at the start of that day), but the 11/17 jump is noticeable near the start of Week 3.
I’ve never taken a day off from my day job as an engineer to write before, but on 11/17 I did - dedicating the whole day toward hitting that double-down goal. It was highly motivating to take a day and write like that - particularly during the standard work week - because it let me pretend I was a professional writer spending my day working on my novel.
Sometimes putting in the work in a different way can be as motivating as a reward/goal.
Daily Word Counts
Now for the graph that shows the real up’s and down’s of day-to-day writing in NaNoWriMo. Anything at or above the 2k line is a day I achieved the writing goal. When you look at the daily count graph, it’s far more apparent that I only reached or exceeded my goals about half the days (around 13), got near but fell short around 8 days, and fell far below the rest (since I finished Nov. 25, that leaves about 4 days).
Here’s the damage report:
Not too bad really. Many of the days where I hit less than 2,000 words were aided by the word count from the day(s) before. For example, Day 5 was the first day I landed below 2k, but because I hit around 2,500 on Day 4, missing 2k by a small amount of words still landed me over 4,000.
That was one of the biggest ‘tracking thoughts’ I had throughout the month - I would remember the previous day, what today’s goal was, and do a ‘self-assessment’ on how the writing was going.
Were the words flowing easily today? If not, did I write enough the last few days that it would be ok to miss the goal?
Sure, I could have convinced myself that I had baked in 5 extra days in the month and just taken the day off (I tried, but not on days I had already started writing), but I wanted to save those if/when I absolutely needed them.
Once more, let’s break this graph down by Act (blue), Week (purple), and total Words (per week; green).
After sectioning this graph, there are two pieces of super interesting data here.
First, when looking by Act, it looks like Act 2 had a far rockier time achieving the daily goal - possibly due to the lack of a solid outline. However, there’s barely enough data for Act 1 to seriously compare to, and what data is there is at the very start of NaNo, a time where I was all geared up and ready to throw down some words. If Act 1 were longer, had 12k of a ‘prologue’ before it, and landed in the midst of NaNo, I predict it too would rocket up and down like Act 2.
And second, Weeks 2 and 4 both fail weekly goals (14,000 words). We can toss out Week 4 because that’s the week I finished, so the data ends up being pretty skewed for that week when I simply stopped writing. Week 2 has the lowest daily word count of the whole month (before winning) landing on Nov. 10. If you’re crazy - like me - and went back to the Overall graph above, you’ll see that it nearly flatlines between 11/9-11/10.
In other words: I super failed that day.
We can see how such a “massive” failure ten days in impacted my writing (hint: it barely affected it), but more importantly, how did my mindset react to such an event??
Practicing Failure
November 10 was a busy day - not only did I work my day job, but I also spent time cleaning and picking up the house, and we had extended family arriving that night to stay the weekend. By the time work and cleaning had been done, I was exhausted, and even though I had gotten some words down in the morning before our normal morning rush to get out the door, I had to realize I wasn’t going to hit the day’s goal.
And I was ok with that - I had to be.
Instead of taking the missed word goal as a failure, as something to look at negatively, I instead chose to look at it positively. I had gotten a lot done around the house that was worth celebrating, and part of the creative process is accepting when things don’t go to plan. Creativity can’t always be planned - especially when crammed into a month between all the other aspects of day to day life.
Be OK with failure. Let it happen. Embrace it, and learn how to better your process; better yourself in how you react in the midst of the questioning moments of failure.
Consciously, I told my friends on Discord that I was taking the day to embrace failure. There’s nothing wrong with that, even though I think it’s a natural tendency for us creatives to use that as fuel for the self-conscious-negativity machine.
In the next post, we look at how I rewarded myself throughout the month to keep my head above water. And we reach the penultimate moment of NaNoWriMo - hitting the monthly goal! If you haven’t already subscribed, I’d highly encourage it - you get fresh new content delivered right to your inbox. You can subscribe here. Continue reading about NaNoWriMo here: