My NaNoWriMo 2021 Experience

NaNoWriMo is an annual celebration and challenge for people who want to commit to writing things. As mentioned, the goal of National Novel Writing Month is to write a novel in a single 30-day period. It’s a non-exclusive event, so anyone who is willing to make the commitment can participate by signing up at NaNoWriMo.org and writing 50,000 words in a single month. The tagline for the organization is “The world needs your novel.” (Whether it actually does is debatable, but that’s a good thing to tell yourself when seeking motivation.) More details are available at the NaNoWriMo website.

As always, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about for National Novel Writing Month. October is supposed to be the prep month – do an outline, some research, at least a plot sketch and some character background. But the days kept slipping by as I focused on other things – my life seems always full of lots of other things – and no sense of a subject or premise for a novel seeped into my awareness.

But on October 24, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. I would write about Ken’s murder.

It’s been 28 years since my boss was murdered on Halloween night, 1993. I have lived with the story of it tucked away in the folds of my psyche all these years, not allowing it out, keeping it hidden, for private viewing only.

It’s a hard story. I have wanted to tell it, but always stopped because the story is not mine to tell. Yet I did live through it. It profoundly affected my life, changed the course of my destiny, altered my career path, and sent me into a spiral of depression and disillusionment. My body developed cancer. My mind took a long time to heal. I got help with the depression, realized I had to deal with the cancer, and generally got back on track after several months – years – of trying to deal with the loss of my friend and my career.

But the story was not mine to tell.

Only… in November, novels are written. What if I fictionalized the story – so that I could jump into the heads of the people who DID own the story? In fact, I could leap from one to the next, showing how it happened from multiple points of view. Giving their emotional take as well as my own. I could become a character in the story – not the main
one, but an adjunct that moves the story forward…

And in that instant as I jerked awake in the middle of the night, I knew I would do this for NaNo. The discipline of the daily word count would keep me at it, even through the parts that have always been too painful to think about. Just write it! It doesn’t even have to be good – as long as you get to 50,000 words by November 30. Just write! And then figure it all out. I felt ready. 28 years of healing, of perspective. Many of the central characters are no longer alive. And if its fiction, I don’t HAVE to do copious amounts of research – that would REALLY be painful – because I can make up all the details of the bits I remember. Invent addictions, prejudices, schemes for my characters.

Try to get into the head of the murderer. It has always been impossible for me to believe that she could have worked herself up to kill my friend and colleague. The desperation she must have felt: the selfish need to eradicate the person she saw as an obstacle to her dreams, her life. I have never been able to grapple with that much selfishness and
pure evil embedded in her heart.

But here was a real opportunity for me to deal with something that has kept me off-kilter for so many years – nearly three decades. Maybe I could use it to heal myself as well.
As I lay in bed, the novel presented itself to my brain almost like a completed project. I could see it. I could feel it. If no one else ever read it, it would still be valuable. But I suspect that others will very much want to read this story.

This story that was suddenly mine to tell. As fiction. NaNoWriMo was giving me permission to deal with it as fiction – something I can handle. Something healing and ultimately, kind of compassionate. Maybe I could find a way to understand the murderer. And from understanding, healing. And maybe even
forgiveness. Maybe.

I fell back to sleep knowing how I would spend November, and that when it was done, I would have accomplished something good.

Ultimately I completed 56,000 words in 30 days – and some of them are even pretty good. Now I edit and work out details. It’s still challenging, but it’s worth it. To tell this story as mine.