going to be talking about your age, or how you wrote the book in thirty days. ... otherwise tryâto cast aside fears, t
NaNoWriMo Pep Talk: Jennifer Lynn Barnes Week 4 I wrote my first published novel when I was nineteen years old. It was the seventh novel I’d written, and I wrote it in nineteen days. If National Novel Writing Month had existed back then, I would have been all over it—so when I sat down to write advice for those of you tackling NaNoWriMo this year, I thought about the advice I would most want to give my nineteen-year-old self, and here it is. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how old you are when you write a book. It doesn’t matter how quickly you write it. What matters is the story. Years from now, people aren’t going to be talking about your age, or how you wrote the book in thirty days. They’re going to be talking about the characters, the way the story surprised them, the parts where you made them feel something. They’re going to be talking about the fact that when they were feeling lonely or scared or confused, they re-read your book, because it felt like going home. I think it’s really easy as a writer—and especially as a young writer—to get caught up in self-imposed deadlines, to think of the goal as “getting a book published before I am X years old” and to freak yourself out as that arbitrary deadline draws nearer and nearer. But as my writer friends and I often remind each other, writing isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. This may seem like an odd thing to tell someone as they begin to take on the incredible challenge of writing a novel in a month, but if I’ve learned one thing in the years since that first book came out, it’s that writers, as a general population, don’t always excel at being kind to themselves. Every writer I know has moments where they worry that what they’re writing simply isn’t good enough, and every writer I know has hit a point where they realize that what they’re doing isn’t working. I know people who have tried and tried and tried to outline, but can’t, and I know people who prided themselves on not outlining, but suddenly found themselves pulling out stacks of index cards to plot out a book, scene by scene. I’ve known people who realized midway through the book that the entire thing had been written in the wrong point of view and people who got to the end only to realize that they were writing the wrong story altogether.
One of the best gifts you can give yourself as a writer is permission to try different things and to be kind yourself as you discover what does and does not work for you. I think that one of the best things about NaNoWriMo is that it pushes people to try writing in a way that they might never otherwise try—to cast aside fears, to push forward, and to get words down on the page. But at the end of the day, writing is a marathon, not a sprint. Whether you reach 50,000 words in the month of November or not, your journey—and your book’s journey—won’t end there. So if you see your time ticking down, if you see a self-imposed deadline approaching—be st it December 1 , or your desire to be published by X date—take a deep breath. Remember that every writer is different. Every story is different. And at the end of the day, the story is what matters. Jennifer Lynn Barnes has written more than a dozen young adult novels, including The Fixer, the Raised by Wolves series, and the Naturals series. She has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science. She received her PhD from Yale University and is now a professor of psychology and writing. Visit Jennifer online at www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com and on Twitter at @jenlynnbarnes.
