How National Novel Writing Month Changed My Life
When my father died, writing became the one safe place in a chaotic world.
NaNoWriMo — the abbreviated name for National Novel Writing Month — takes place every November. During this one chilly month, millions of words written by tens of thousands of people across the globe. The focus of the event? Writing 50,000 words in exactly 30 days.
When I started NaNoWriMo, I was sixteen. I have fond memories of staying up late at a friend’s house on Halloween as we dived into our writing at the stroke of midnight. There is a certain sorcerous power in such a ritual; it was a coming of age ceremony in a sense, the entering of some liminal divide.
The next year, my father died. He was a writer of uncommon skill in poetic language, and I looked up to him as a child, fascinated by how he worked with words.
I remember very little about that year. I have vague memories, only. A sense that I was an unfinished human being, unmoored from childhood before I was prepared to face the challenges of the adult world. It was as Novemeber rolled around that I felt any sense of myself return. National Novel Writing Month gave me focus, for the first time since my father died.
