In seventh grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Bass O’Brien, introduced the class to a writing assignment. This wasn’t any ordinary essay or anything, this assignment was to write a novel.
In the days leading up to November first, she walked us through how to work a website called NaNoWriMo, which is short for National November Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is a nonprofit organization that sets you up to write a short story–or even a whole book–in the course of thirty days.
I immediately jumped in, writing a story about a girl who went to a summer camp and then had her cabin mate disappear. She and her cabin members, with the help of the counselor, went into the woods to look for her. In retrospect, it really wasn’t a good story. But it was my first attempt at one of my new favorite things.
I wrote ten thousand words that first month, five hundred a day. It wasn’t too hard, but near Thanksgiving, I drifted off and on the second to last day of the challenge, I ended up writing a bunch of words to catch up.
The next year, Mrs. Bass O’Brien was hesitant to do the assignment again, but I and a few other students begged and, sure enough, the next year we did NaNoWriMo. This time, I wrote a story about a girl whose sister stole her boyfriend, and her subconscious decided to murder both of them. I wrote it as a novel that would accompany another story written by one of my best friends. I planned the whole thing on notecards with my friend. I wrote an average of seven hundred words a day that year.
Even though I’ve graduated from middle school this year, I continue to do NaNoWriMo. Though it’s still a work in progress, my goal is to write forty-five thousand words, one thousand five hundred a day.
The story is about a girl whose brother got stabbed at a party, and she’s just trying to get by. She has been working towards a tennis tournament for months, and then her parents scheduled the funeral right on the weekend she was supposed to be gone. She’s mad and that- mixed with her growing wrist injury- causes her to take a break from the sport she’s been doing since she was nine. Then her parents found out and ground her, watching to make sure she went to practice.
For Christmas last year, I received a laptop from my dad for the sole purpose of writing. It was very exciting because, on the way to my Aunt and Uncle’s house in Texas for Christmas, I was writing on my phone. And on the way back, I could write on my laptop.
Over the summer and at the end of last year, I joined a program called Written Out Loud, a young novelist program through Yale. I met once a week on Zoom to talk with my writing instructor and a few kids who were also writing like I was. I ended up writing fifty-five thousand words and thirty chapters plus an epilogue.
I didn’t expect to like NaNoWriMo so much going into it, but I think I liked the way that each day has a word goal that gives me a target to get to. Every time I reach a percent of my word goal, a little trumpet sounds which makes the whole thing exciting.
I like writing because it is a way to submerge myself in something and have an excuse to lock myself in my room for hours. I think writing is really difficult but it’s rewarding in that because when I look at the word count I realize how far I’ve come, in what is usually a short amount of time.
Little did I know that the day in seventh grade when I first learned about National November Writing Month it would change my life and I’d fall in love with writing.
